Archaeological Science : Science and Archaeology, or A Science of Archaeology?

It is customary in many standard archaeological textbooks, in summarising the history of the subject, to point to a very crucial new phase originating in the decade after the last war.We are told that partly as a result of technological achievements that were a by-product of the war, scientific hardware began to impinge very significantly upon archaeological investigations.To the survey of field remains came geophysics, to the analysis of recovered artefacts a whole range of physical, chemical and simpler optical techniques, to the business so dear to the heart of generations of archaeologists -constructing time/space grids -came absolute dating, most notably C14, and to the storage and processing of excavation data, procedures of an automatic nature employing computers with complex statistical packages.Thus began our era of 'Scientific Archaeology'.