The Processual Approach

The processual approach attempts to isolate and study the different processes at work within a society, and between societies, placing emphasis on relations with the environment, on subsistence and the economy, on social relations within the society, on the impact that the prevailing ideology and belief system have on these things, and on the effects of the interactions taking place between the different social units.

It is a characteristic of processual explanations that they have usually focused on ecological and social factors the operation of which can be analyzed in some detail. Sometimes a systems model is used, looking at the interaction of what may be defined as the subsystems of the culture system. A good early example of a processual explanation, even though today it is regarded as incomplete, is offered by Lewis Binford’s explanation for the origins of sedentary society and of a farming economy.

In 1968, Binford published an influential paper, “Post-Pleistocene Adaptations,” in which he set out to explain the origins of farming, or food production. Attempts to do this had been made by earlier scholars. But Binford’s explanation had one important feature that distinguished it from earlier explanations and made it very much a product of the New Archaeology: its generality. For he was setting out to explain the origins of farming not just in the Near East or the Mediterranean—although he focused on these areas—but also worldwide. He drew attention to global events at the end of the last Ice Age (i.e. at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, hence the title of his paper).

Binford centered his explanation on demography: he was concerned with population dynamics within small communities, stressing that once a formerly mobile group becomes sedentary—ceases to move around—its population size will increase markedly. For in a settled village the constraints no longer operate that, in a mobile group, severely limit the number of small children a mother can rear. There is no longer the difficulty, for instance, of carrying children from place to place. Crucial to the question was the fact that in the Near East some communities (of the Natufian culture around 9000 BCE) did indeed become sedentary before they were food-producing. He could see that, once settled, there would be considerable population pressure, in view of the greater number of surviving children. This would lead to increasing use of such locally available plant foods as wild cereals, which had hitherto been considered marginal and of little value. From the intensive use of cereals, and the introduction of ways of processing them, would develop the regular cycle of sowing and harvesting, and thus the course of plant-human involvement leading to domestication would be well underway.

But why did these pre-agricultural groups become sedentary in the first place? Binford’s view was that rising sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene (caused by the melting of polar ice) had two significant effects. First, they reduced the extent of the coastal plains available to the hunter-gatherers. And second, the new habitats created by the rise in sea level offered to human groups much greater access to migratory fish and to migrant fowl.

Using these rich resources, rather as the inhabitants of the Northwest Coast of North America have done in more recent times, the hunter-gatherer groups found it possible for the first time to lead a sedentary existence. They were no longer obliged to move.

In some respects Binford’s explanation is seen today as rather too simple. Nevertheless, it has many strengths. Although the focus was on the Near East, the same arguments can equally be applied to other parts of the world. Binford avoided migration or diffusion, and analyzed the origins of farming in processual terms.

Marxist Archaeology

Following the upsurge in theoretical discussion that followed the initial impact of the New Archaeology, there

was a reawakening of interest in applying to archaeology some of the implications of the earlier work of Karl Marx. Marx was an extremely influential nineteenth-century philosopher and political economist. Although his work covered a wide range of issues, he is most famous for his analysis of history in terms of conflicts between social classes.

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The key feature of Marxist archaeology, then, is that change within a past society was caused mainly by the contradictions that arise between the forces of production and social organization. Characteristically these contradictions emerge as a struggle between classes (if this is a society where distinct social classes have already developed). Emphasis on class struggle and internal differences is a feature of most Marxist explanations: this is a view of the world where change comes about through the resolution of internal dissent. It may be contrasted with the “functionalist” view favored by the early New Archaeology, where selective pressures toward greater efficiency are seen to operate and changes are often viewed as mutually beneficial.

In traditional Marxism the ideology of a society—the whole system of knowledge and belief—is seen as largely determined by the nature of the economic base. This point is disputed by the “neo-Marxists” who regard ideology and economics as interrelated and mutually influential, rather than one as dominant and the other subordinate.

Karl Marx has influenced the interpretations of many archaeologists, especially concerning how change occurs in a society.

There are many positive features that Marxist analyses share with processual archaeology, but, in comparison with the processual studies of the New Archaeologists, many such Marxist analyses seem rather short on the handling of concrete archaeological data. The gap between theoretical archaeology and field archaeology is not always effectively bridged, and the critics of Marxist archaeology sometimes observe that since Karl Marx laid down the basic principles more than a century ago, all that remains for the Marxist archaeologists to do is to elaborate them: research in the field is superfluous. Despite these differences, processual archaeology and Marxist archaeology have much in common.