Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
- 1 Studying the History of Archaeology
- 2 Classical and Other Text-Based Archaeologies
- 3 Antiquarianism without Texts
- 4 The Beginnings of Prehistoric Archaeology
- 5 Evolutionary Archaeology
- 6 Culture-Historical Archaeology
- 7 Early Functional-Processual Archaeology
- 8 Processualism and Postprocessualism
- 9 Pragmatic Synthesis
- 10 The Relevance of Archaeology
- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
- REFERENCES
- INDEX
7 - Early Functional-Processual Archaeology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
- 1 Studying the History of Archaeology
- 2 Classical and Other Text-Based Archaeologies
- 3 Antiquarianism without Texts
- 4 The Beginnings of Prehistoric Archaeology
- 5 Evolutionary Archaeology
- 6 Culture-Historical Archaeology
- 7 Early Functional-Processual Archaeology
- 8 Processualism and Postprocessualism
- 9 Pragmatic Synthesis
- 10 The Relevance of Archaeology
- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
- REFERENCES
- INDEX
Summary
Forms and types, that is, products, have been regarded as more real and alive than the society which created them and whose needs determined these manifestations of life.
a. m. tallgren, “The method of prehistoric archaeology” (1937), p. 155As the inadequacies of culture-historical archaeology for understanding how prehistoric cultures operated and changed became obvious to a growing number of archaeologists, they adopted new approaches to the study of prehistory that were based on systematic anthropological and sociological investigations of human behavior. These approaches are generally designated as being functional and processual in nature. Culture-historical studies traditionally explained changes from the outside by attributing them to diffusion and migration. Functional and processual studies try to understand social and cultural systems from the inside by determining how different parts of these systems are interrelated and how these parts interact with one another. Functionalism is a synchronous approach that attempts to understand how systems operate routinely without accounting for major changes. Processual approaches seek to understand how and why such systems change irreversibly. Yet, many self-styled functionalist anthropologists also were interested in how systems changed (Malinowski 1945; Evans-Pritchard 1949, 1962). Although functionalist approaches are often presumed to have preceded processual ones in anthropology, both have been employed at least incipiently in prehistoric archaeology since the mid-nineteenth century and they were often used together.
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- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Archaeological Thought , pp. 314 - 385Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006