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Essay / What is processual archaeology? - 2075
Procedural archeology is a movement in the archaeological field that began in the 1960s and forever changed the course of archeology. Anthropologists such as Julian Steward had a considerable influence on many archaeologists and anthropologists in the early 1960s with his theories of cultural ecology which established a scientific way of understanding cultures as human adaptation to the environment (Steward , 1955: 36-38). It was approaches such as Stewards that ultimately led to the rejection of cultural and historical approaches to the archaeological record and propelled ideas of cultural evolution and its reaction with the environment. This cultural systems approach was essentially a rejection of the cultural-historical approach to determinism by suggesting that the environment influences culture but is not a deterministic characteristic and that culture and environment were two distinct systems that depend on the each other for change (Steward, 1955: 36). Following Steward, existing explanations of migration and cultural diffusion as explanations for the formation of cultural systems became inadequate. Thompson, argued that simply recognizing that migration had taken place was not enough to explain cultural systems, but that the processes that propelled migration were important (Thompson 1958: 1). Leslie White then proposed that cultural systems functioned as a reaction of humans and their environment and therefore the materials created were linked to the relationship with their environment through tools, techniques and symbolism (White, 1959: 8). .These leading anthropologists paved the way for Lewis Binford and his absolutely influential article Archeology as Anthropology in which Binfo...... middle of article ...... adequate use in trying to explain complex problems (Salmon 1978: 179). -180). Trigger notes that the fundamental flaw of systems theory was that it "was less useful in explaining change than in describing it" (1989: 308). Although there have been major critiques of systems theory, it is still occasionally applied in current archeology to describe the components of cultural systems. For example, in the field of paleolinguistics, Colin Renfrew, in re-examining the Proto-Indo-European language and arguing for the spread of Indo-European languages across Neolithic Europe in relation to the spread of agriculture,[11] described three fundamental and primary processes by which a language comes to be spoken in a specific area: initial colonization, replacement, and continued development. From obvious reasoning, he arrived at radically new conclusions..