[Th]
Essentially, the New Archaeology of the late 1960s and 1970s, processual archaeology is grounded in a positivism view of the past and takes an essentially anthropological view of ancient societies. Drawing on earlier work in the field of biology, systems theory became a dominant model in processual views of the past. In this, societies are seen as a series of subsystems interacting with each other and the environment in which the system is set. What interested processual archaeologists were the processes that prompted and thus explained change whether they were natural (e.g. climatic) or anthropogenic (e.g. population growth; agricultural intensification; accelerated trade). The overall aim was to move away from simply describing archaeological evidence towards trying to provide robust explanations for the patterns in it.
