and its close relations with anthropology and at the same time criticized what were regarded as some of its theoretical excesses. Like Daniel and other intellectual historians of archaeology, Willey and Sabloff stressed the value of relating changes in archaeology to the intellectual tenor of the period; to theoretical developments in other fields such as ecology, systems analysis, and art history but above all to ethnology and social anthropology; to the availability of new analytical techniques such as radiocarbon dating and computers; and to changing patterns of funding. They blamed the failure of American archaeologists to adopt an evolutionary perspective prior to the 1960s at least partly on the influence of Boasian anthropology. Yet, by claiming that in the long run the development of archaeology was controlled by the discovery of new evidence and the utilization of sounder methods for evaluating data, Willey and Sabloff provided processual archaeology with a considerably more predetermined pedigree than Daniel had accorded culture-historical archaeology or Casson had provided for evolutionary archaeology.

The view that the history of archaeology consisted of a sequence of well-defined stages was shared by various contributors to James Fitting’s The Development of North American Archaeology (1973), which consisted of a series of individually authored regional archaeological histories. This view, which contrasted with Daniel’s gradualist vision of change, invited comparison with Thomas Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolutions, and this comparison was made explicit by Eugene Sterud in a paper titled “A Paradigmatic View of Prehistory” (in Colin Renfrew, ed., The Explanation of Culture Change [1973]).

Sterud posited two successive paradigms: the three-age system of the nineteenth century and processual archaeology. Using different terminology, the English archaeologist david clarke argued that the preparadigmatic stage had lasted until the advent of critically self-conscious processual archaeology (1973). Yet, unlike Kuhn, these archaeologists viewed successive periods in a positivist fashion, as a logical and largely inevitable sequence of development. Only Fitting chose to follow Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and stress the socially determined nature of paradigms as well as to reject the cumulative character of archaeological understanding. Fitting regarded science as basically irrational and maintained that “prerevolutionary science is neither more nor less scientific than postrevolutionary science” (290).

Perhaps the most sophisticated product of the positivist approach to the history of archaeology produced so far is Donald Grayson’s The Establishment of Human Antiquity (1983), which traces the steps that made possible the recognition in 1859 that human beings had inhabited the earth for much longer than the traditional biblical chronology implied. Although Grayson acknowledges that religious beliefs and social factors inhibited the recognition of this antiquity, he concludes that, ultimately, recognition was accomplished by providing irrefutable evidence of a human presence in geological contexts that were demonstrably more than 6,000 years old. The positivist approach is not limited to North America. The Swedish archaeologist Bo Graslund’s The Birth of Prehistoric Chronology (1987) stresses the empirical nature of the Scandinavian research that laid the basis of seriation dating. He also emphasizes that this was a project almost completely internal to archaeology. Both of these books provide evidence not only of a positivist outlook but also of an internalist approach, which concentrates on delineating the changing understanding of a particular problem by archaeologists. The two approaches are conceptually closely aligned.

The first intellectual biography of an archaeologist, stuart piggott’s William Stukeley, was rooted in intellectual history, as was Michael Hunter’s study of John Aubrey. R.B. Woodbury’s Alfred V. Kidder (1973) and Bruce Trigger’s Gordon Childe (1980) utilized a similar intellectual approach, although they related their subjects’ work more specifically to its archaeological and anthropological context. Robert Cunnington’s From Antiquary to Archaeologist (1975), a biography of his ancestor william cunnington, delineates Cunnington’s understanding of successive discoveries and provides insights into the sophistication that was possible in the late eighteenth century, as well as the limitations