Many people are becoming increasingly aware that the so-called New Archaeology of the 60s and early 70s was flawed. Though the New Archaeology met resistance from its inception, a tradition of substantial epistemological critique began more than thirty years ago (Bayard 1969; Kushner 1970; Levin 1973; Morgan 1973; Tuggle et al. 1972). However there is little consensus as to the nature and scale of these flaws. It can be claimed that the New Archaeology actually inhibited the development of archaeology itself by trying to subsume it within other realms of study, such as anthropology and the natural sciences. In fact, within anthropology, the type of materialist, neo-evolutionary approach from which New Archaeologists drew inspiration had already lost much of its ground to interpretive, symbolic and structural approaches. Despite David Clarke's insistence on ‘archaeology is archaeology is archaeology’ (1968), his own approach, based on the importation of ideas from statistics, geography and the information sciences, has not led to a viable and distinctive archaeology.

Despite the great methodological contribution of the New Archaeology, many of the central concerns of the pre-New Archaeology era need to be rediscovered if an adequate archaeological discussion is to take place. Of course, the traditional approaches themselves had flaws, and these have to be dealt with. But the older approaches do not have to be thrown out totally, in the way that the New Archaeology sometimes rejected ‘normative’ archaeology (Flannery 1967; Binford 1962; 1965).