processualists

The post-processualists continued to attack the processualists for their “positivism,” which they believed had turned the scientific method into a magic fetish that would supposedly open the doors to all the knowledge worth knowing, while the processualists countered that their critics wanted to infect archaeology with a postmodern, “anything goes” cultural relativism that was not subject to testing or any other kind of objective verification.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

Likewise Ian and the post-processualists had their own specialized jargon: “Material culture is meaningfully constituted,” “multivocality,” and “context,” among other bits of lingo.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

In reopening Çatalhöyük, Ian also set more conventional goals for the project—goals that most other archaeologists, whether processualists or post-processualists, could endorse.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

Despite persistent accusations from the processualists that Ian and his followers were embracing an “anything goes” postmodernist cultural relativism, in recent years Ian had come to accept that the stories archaeologists told about the past had to be rigorously consistent with the available evidence.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

As Ian and his followers continued to refine and publish their ideas over the next several years, the polemics between the processualists and post-processualists degenerated into an ever more strident shouting match between the two camps, of which Lewis Binford and Ian Hodder were now the undisputed ringleaders.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

For the New Archaeologists the best way to stave off the temptations of subjectivity was to adopt the most rigorous possible scientific methodology; for Ian and the post-processualists, the answer lay in self-critical and self-aware contemplation.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

In the meantime the processualists were not just sitting around and watching the paradigm shift.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

The world of the Natufians had not been turned upside down by the goddess and the bull, the processualists declared, but by something called the Younger Dryas.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005

In Symbols in Action, he put his finger on what he now concluded was the processualists’ biggest mistake: they had failed to appreciate the complexity and richness of human culture.

The Goddess and the Bull MICHAEL BALTER 2005