CHAPTER 6 : Making Sense of the Past

• Placing 'theory' into a final chapter does not mean that I consider it separate from 'practice', any more than my other chapters imply clear dividing lines between science and dating, or excavation and fieldwork.
• The first half of this final chapter will require close reading, for it presents a concise overview of developments in archaeological theory since the middle decades of the twentieth century. These developments coincided with some fundamental changes in outlook that accompanied the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. An optimistic and confident approach called the New Archaeology emerged in the 1950s, characterised by an approach called processualism, which attempted to make the subject more 'scientific'.
  
• More recent postprocessual archaeology is not easy to summarise, but is very important because much general writing about archaeology - and prehistory in particular - has been caught up in wider intellectual movements associated with modernism and (to a lesser extent) postmodernism. Structuralism and post-structuralism have had profound effects upon culture in general, from art and literature to the sciences, and archaeology reflects this wider situation.
  
• Philosophies that have looked critically at modernism have brought positive benefits to interpretive archaeology, which pays greater attention to individual experiences than abstract processes, and raises the profile of issues such as gender and ethnicity.
  
• The remainder of chapter 6 examines archaeology and the public, a particularly interesting topic in the opening years of the twenty-first century, and one which has been heavily influenced by the changing intellectual climate of archaeological theory.