Another influence transforming historical archaeology, and its selection of sites, during the 1960s and 1970s was culture theory. This field had emerged between 1930 and 1960 when the culture-history paradigm dominated anthropological archaeology. Historical archaeologists easily worked within this perspective, and their emphasis on discrete events and famous sites, attention to specific questions derived more from history than from anthropology, and their successful attempts to chronologically place artifact types and date historic assemblages matched similar goals among prehistorians.

In the mid-1960s, just as historical archaeology was achieving separate professional standing, the impact of the “new” or processual archaeology radically changed all American archaeology. The relationship between historical archaeology and this fundamental paradigm shift was complex and somewhat misleading. The study of historic sites seemed to play a central role in the movement—even lewis binford, the founder of processual archaeology, had dug at Fort Michilimackinac (1959) and had attempted to refine Harrington’s pipe-stem dating system—and in the middle of the decade, “new archaeology” was thought to have two equally innovative coconsuls: Lewis Binford and James J.F. Deetz.

That perception was erroneous and is clarified when the orientations of Deetz and an equally important contemporary, Stanley South, are contrasted. South, who had known Binford as a fellow student, converted to processualism, and his development of pattern recognition and his advocacy of quantitative methods reflected a desire to make historical archaeology more scientific and processual. He advanced this goal at a number of archaeological forums he organized in the late 1960s and explicitly outlined it in his book Method and Theory in Historical Archaeology (1977).

Deetz, by contrast, was never a processualist. His 1960 Ph.D. dissertation, published as The Dynamics of Stylistic Change in Arikara Ceramic (Deetz 1965), corresponded to, and probably predated, attempts by Binford’s students in the Southwest to reconstruct prehistoric social organization from archaeological remains. His prominent research on New England gravestone seriation and the evolution of mortuary art also seemed processual in its quantitative nature and potential for testing specific hypotheses and models. Nevertheless, Deetz’s theoretical orientation, unlike that of Binford and South, and his interpretative, cultural, and humanistic perspective more accurately foreshadowed the postprocessual archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s than did Binfordian positivism.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the field practices and concepts of most historical archaeologists more closely matched the view of ivor noël hume, an English archaeologist at colonial Williamsburg, as outlined in his book Historical Archaeology (Hume 1969). Those archaeologists were, and are to this day, historicalist and particularistic in practice and theory. A few visible figures, such as Stanley South, Charles Cleland, and James Fitting, were explicitly processual, but a more dynamic veneer of symbolic-structuralist interpretation, created by Deetz, his students, and a few colleagues, especially the folklorist Henry Glassie, highlighted the field and brought it to the attention of general anthropologists.

Historical archaeologists were not only studying past social organization and behavior in the 1960s, they were also socially organizing themselves. In 1960, Stanley South founded the very active if somewhat informal Conference on Historic Site Archaeology, which met from 1960 to 1982. Its Conference Papers and organized forums were the intellectual center of the field across the decade and well into the 1970s. The conference was national in scope but regionally based in the Southeast, and in 1966, a more clearly regional group, the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology, was initiated in New York State.

In January 1967, in Dallas, Texas, historical archaeology was finally given an autonomous and viable base. At the invitation of Edward B. Jelks, almost all the leading figures in the field, constituting a “committee of fifteen,” came together at Southern Methodist University and successfully organized the society for historical archaeology (SHA). For the next thirty years this international association, clearly separate from the society for american archaeology