Interpretive Archaeologists – The New Breed

Their work was part of a wider movement which began to question some of the principles and methods of the New Archaeology that had taken hold in the 1960s. This new movement’s followers called themselves interpretive archaeologists.

This rejection of New Archaeology was in part due to a belief that a scientific approach to the evidence could end up underplaying the role of symbolism and ritual in human societies. At a site like Stonehenge, which surely has ceremonial significance, this new breed of archaeologist found the perfect place to test their philosophy.

Professor Timothy Darvill “Interpretive archaeology brings to bear a whole new set of thinking about the past and it stands in quite a contrast with the New Archeology that went before it. New Archaeology was in large measure concerned with societies, with communities, with groups of people – cultures, if you like. The interpretive archaeologies that have come after it are much more concerned with the individual, the way that people play a role, the way we do what’s called agency.

We act in a responsible and active way in thinking about how we behave in the world, that we take, for example, meaning out of materials. It’s often dressed up as the idea of materiality, the way that materials influence the way that we do things. And just as Stonehenge was a fantastic site to explore in the New Archaeology, it has become a real focus of attention in the interpretive archaeology that comes after it because it gives us so many opportunities to think about stone, for example, to think about sequences, to think about the way people could behave in a monument like this, the way that space is structured inside the monument, the way that we would move around within it, and we can put ourselves, if you like, into the shoes of Neolithic people and think about how that place would have been experienced.”