Editing Post-processual archaeology (section)

== Criticism ==
As the archaeologists [[Colin Renfrew]] and [[Paul Bahn]] noted, "For its most severe critics, [post-processualism], while making a number of valid criticisms, simply developed some of the ideas and theoretical problems introduced by [processualism]. To these critics it brought in a variety of approaches from other disciplines, so that the term "postprocessual," while rather neatly echoing the epithet "[[postmodern]]" in literary studies, was a shade arrogant in presuming to supersede what it might quite properly claim to complement."{{sfn|Renfrew|Bahn|2004|p=44}}

In their article "Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique" (1987), Timothy K. Earle and Robert W. Preucel examined the post-processual movement's "radical critique" of processualism, and while accepting that it had some merit and highlighted some important points, they came to the conclusion that on the whole, the post-processual approach was flawed because it failed to produce an explicit methodology.{{sfn|Earle|Preucel|1987}}