People don't think academic things have #fashions and trends, oh but they do! #Archaeology31 has fashion as its theme today, so let me tell you a bit about how time passes and ideas change, just like skirt length and heel height!

In the beginning there was all sorts of horrors we would scream at now - 19th and early 20th century archaeology has more weirdie stuff than a Parler chat line, with noble savages, phrenology, orientalism, and God knows what. It's like fascist central, I sweartyfuq. All our probs

Really start there, because twas a white man's game. David Clarke of Cambridge once waxed that we had lost our ' noble innocence'. With a straight face please note. Anyway, less rant from me. I'm not a fan of this period at all, as you can tell! In the 70s a new wave of bright

(white) youngish things looked at the theory of cultural evolutionism.which became known as Processualism, as culture changes were a process. It brought a heavier and welcome dose of science to archaeology, and thinking of other cultures in a more ethno historical way

In the middle of all this, Systems theory and Marxism got added to the cocktail of theory ( Marxism often worked better than the Systems theory if I'm honest). But fashions in ideas change so in the 80s came Post Processualism.

Which is about subjectivity of interpretation. It gathered other smaller ideas round it, including Neo Marxism, postmodernism, structuralism, with a big heady dose of phenomenology added. Sometimes, the archaeological papers aren't very easy or cogent to read, alienating people

We've since ( mostly) moved into a more practical use of theory, although some of it does go up its own ass a bit. The truth is, all the theories carry cores of truth and ways to interpret the past. And remember, what we do is to interpret it, with a lot of admitted maybes

So we maybe ( hah!) are at a stage where we can look at each case, and use the wiser papers of the past to see what might be the most likely reasoning behind what people did. There'll be new ideological fashions I'm sure, because people now are as complex as those in the past!