the end of the nineteenth century, a number of groups claimed that they had
come up with novel theories which were going to alter deeply the state of the
art in the discipline. At this time the growth in the number of practitioners in
the discipline had reached a level that allowed the formation of competing
factions. Interestingly, only in the 1960s did group consciousness lead to the
emergence of large ‘—isms’ movements in archaeology like New Archaeology.
In contrast to the 1960s, and even the 1920s, however, in the nineteenth
century debate among scholars was much more fragmented, an impression
that is not given by most of the summaries of the evolution of theory in
archaeology written in recent years (Gamble 2001: ch. 2; Redman 1999;
Renfrew & Bahn 2004: ch. 12).
26 Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century