60 Years of Southwestern Archaeology, A History of the Pecos Conference, by Richard B. Woodbury, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1993.

Abstract

Among the least commendable characteristics of the New Archaeology is a marked anti-historical perspective. The history of archaeology and much, if not most, of earlier theory, method, and the results of fieldwork are considered not worth knowing or irrelevant, especially for graduate education: "graduate courses in anthropology should cease being histories of thought" (Schiffer 1976:193). Regrettably, New Archaeologists generally adopted this perspective and attitude, and partly because they did not pay attention to the history of archaeology, they tended to confirm Santayana's "hypothesis" about the consequences of forgetting the past: many of the arguments and accompanying rancor in the current debate between New Archaeologists and Post-Processualists resound the confrontation of a quarter century ago between New Archaeologists - "the louts" as Florence Hawley Ellis called them (p. 307, this volume) and their predecessors. Furthermore, because the antihistorical bias became so widely adopted, it was difficult to publish on the history of archaeology, at least in the United States.