abandonment of sober analytical studies in favor of Druidical fantasies. All of these works sought to relate changes in British antiquarian research to the broader history of ideas.

Another major contribution to the emerging intellectual history of archaeology was Annette Laming-Emperaire’s Origines de l’archéologie préhistorique en France (1964), which traced the development of archaeology from medieval times until it achieved “essentially its modern form” in the late nineteenth century. Laming-Emperaire sought to account for the divisions of theory, method, organization, and attitude within modern French archaeology, especially those that differentiated the study of the Paleolithic period from that of more recent ones. Paleolithic archaeology was seen as having been created in the nineteenth century as a result of the combined influences of geology, paleontology, physical anthropology, and ethnology, which in turn promoted the development of a widespread interest in biological and cultural evolution. Paleolithic archaeology was seen as maintaining close links to the natural sciences while the study of later prehistory remained more closely aligned with history. Laming-Emperaire’s book was distinguished by her careful examination of how structures of teaching and research, professional associations, and journals reflected and shaped the development of archaeology.

In the United States, the modern scholarly history of archaeology began, rather inauspiciously, with walter taylor’s A Study of Archaeology (1948). In the first part of that book, Taylor offered a savage critique of what he believed to be the theoretical inadequacies and resulting methodological shortcomings that had characterized the work of leading American archaeologists over the previous several decades. The frosty reception given this work may have inhibited the publication of more histories of archaeology for the following two decades.

Although the history of archaeology was often surveyed in graduate courses and brief discussions of it appeared in histories of anthropology, it was not until the general upheaval produced by “the new archaeology” of the 1960s that works devoted exclusively to the history of American archaeology began to appear. It was argued that the critical self-appraisal going on in American archaeology required a review of the development of the discipline and its concepts. Not surprisingly, in view of the positivism that was pervasive throughout the social sciences in the United States at the time and played a major role in new (or processual) archaeology, the study of the history of archaeology took a more positivist turn in the United States than it had in Britain or france. American archaeology was seen as following a logical and ultimately inevitable pattern, which, in the absence of political interference or social anomalies, would describe the development of archaeology everywhere. This course was thought to be shaped largely by the role played by evidence in confirming and refuting existing theories.

The first substantial contribution was Douglas Schwartz’s Conceptions of Kentucky Prehistory (1967) in which he argued that American archaeology had been characterized by three successive approaches: a speculative one, followed after 1850 by an empirical trend and after 1950 by an explanatory one. Although each new trend was treated as supplementary to, rather than replacing, earlier ones, the overall effect was to transform archaeology in an irreversible manner.

The first comprehensive treatment of New World archaeology was gordon willey and Jeremy Sabloff’s A History of American Archaeology (1974), which first appeared in Glyn Daniel’s World of Archaeology series and has gone through two major revisions (2d ed., 1980; 3d ed., 1993). Willey and Sabloff divided their history into four periods: speculative (1492– 1840), classificatory-descriptive (1840–1914), classificatory-historical (1914–l960), and explanatory (1960–present). In the third edition, the last stage is invidiously referred to as the modern period. Each division was defined as a specific unit of time, not as a overlapping trend, on the premise that the concept of “period” was more appropriate than that of “trend” for the purposes of historical analysis. Thus, Willey and Sabloff adopted a stratigraphic view of archaeological development.

A History of American Archaeology offered a historical legitimation of processual archaeology