In Europe and North America, culture-historical and functional-processual archaeology might have continued to develop alongside one another in a complementary fashion as they had done in the 1950s. Instead, in the early 1960s, a group of American processual archaeologists launched an all-out attack on culture-historical archaeology, which they proposed to replace with an approach that was evolutionist, behaviorist, ecological, and positivist in orientation. In the late 1980s, archaeologists, mainly in Britain, offered an equally dogmatic, culturally oriented postprocessual archaeology as a solution for what they proclaimed were processual archaeology's shortcomings. Neither option has lived up to its promise to solve all of archaeology's problems, although together they offer productive ways to consider many, but not all, of the questions archaeologists must address. In retrospect, these two antagonistic positions can be seen to reflect successive theoretical fashions in anthropology.

Neoevolutionism

The two decades following World War II were an era of unrivaled prosperity and unchallenged political power for the United States. Despite the threat of nuclear war, this also was a time of great optimism and self-confidence for middle-class Americans.