Archaeology Glossary Project

New Archaeology

A modern approach to the problems of archaeological interpretrations, which had the following characteristics - 1)archaeology was now to explain past change, not simply to describe it, 2)archaeology would now think in terms of culture process in explaining archaelogical finds, 3)New archaeology involves the formulation of hypotheses and models and uses more deductive reasoning, 4) hypotheses were to be tested and only accepted on the basis of the evidence, not the standing of the archaeologist, 5) research should be designed to answer specific questions economically, 6)archaeology was now to incorporate quantitative data using sampling and significance testing, and 7)archaeology would now be more positive and try to solve all problems.
New archaelogy began in about the mid-1960s in the United States.
An example of the influence of new archaeology is in the Great Zimbabwe site of monuments, which has historicaly been ascribed to other cultures by traditional archaelogists. New archaelogy has backed up claims of those who say that those in Zimbabwe built the site themselves in ancient times with no foreign builder. This is in the Archaeology textbook.

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