Processual archaeology made contributions to archaeological theory by encouraging the notion of culture as adaptive, and by applying systems theory, information exchange theory and a host of other general theories. Many of these ideas had existed in some form in earlier approaches in archaeology, and the extent of this continuity will be further examined below. Yet perhaps the major contribution made by the New Archaeology was methodological (Meltzer 1979; Moore and Keene 1983, p. 4). Archaeologists became more concerned about problems of inference, sampling and research design. Quantitative and statistical techniques were used more frequently; procedures were questioned and made more explicit. Contextual archaeology is an attempt to develop archaeological methodology further.

In the realm of theory, there have been a number of developments since the early 1960s which, it can be argued, indicate movement from the initial stance of processual archaeology as represented by the early papers of Binford (1962; 1965) and Flannery (1967). In the 1980s, what we now call post-processual archaeology encouraged an engagement with the theoretical turns taken in other fields, particularly anthropology, which had explored many new directions not foreseen by the first wave of anthropological archaeology in the 1960s. In the new millennium, as the debate between processualism and post-processualism gives way to a thousand archaeologies (Preucel 1995; Schiffer 2000), the usefulness of this debate is as questionable as the demand for a resolution (Hutson 2001; cf. Van Pool and Van Pool 1999).