Back then, most of my professors claimed that archaeology was not an autonomous discipline. Rather, it was history's crutch. Archaeology's aim was to provide examples of things referred to in the historical record and to test the accuracy of that record. For this reason, my training included many lists of kings and generals, architectural styles and ceramic typologies. It was all interesting and beautiful, but not terribly exciting.
Archaeology is what made the cat walk on the fresh cement.
Developed in the United States, this view of archaeology became widely known in the 1960s and 1970s through the writings of Lewis R. Binford. Unlike the old archaeology, New Archaeology was affiliated with anthropology rather than history. In anthropology we study others . In the United States, where Euro-Americans were studying the Native American past, anthropology seemed to be an appropriate model for archaeology. In Europe, where we study our past , we feel that we are recovering our own history.