Processual archaeology (formerly, the New Archaeology) is a form of archaeological theory that had its beginnings in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology, in which the pair stated that "American archaeology is anthropology, or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958:2), a rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's comment: "My own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history, and being nothing." The idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human culture. That was a critique of the former period in archaeology, the cultural-history phase in which archaeologists thought that any information that artifacts contained about past people and past ways of life would be lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. All they felt could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts. (Cultural Historical Theory disregards the material record, and instead focuses solely on ideas of how culture could have developed, not caring if there is proof of these ideas in the archaeological record. Processual Archaeology argues that ideas and theories mean nothing without any ability to prove them, so it applied the scientific method to archaeology, emphasizing the need for objectivity when looking at the material record, to ensure that what they find is replicable.)

Proponents of the new phase in archaeology claimed that the rigorous use of the scientific method made it possible to get past the limits of the archaeological record and to learn something about how the people who used the artifacts lived. Colin Renfrew, a proponent of the new processual archaeology, observed in 1987 that it focuses attention on "the underlying historical processes which are at the root of change". Archaeology, he noted, "has learnt to speak with greater authority and accuracy about the ecology of past societies, their technology, their economic basis and their social organization. Now it is beginning to interest itself in the ideology of early communities: their religions, the way they expressed rank, status and group identity."