As we have already said in the previous lessons, a substantive progress progress in the knowledge of the ancient past of the humankind was achieved in the first half of the 20th century, And also due to the fundamental discovery of a stratigraphic archeology, the basis was laid definition for archaeological explorations based on rigorous theoretical principle and practical procedures. Such principles and procedures have allowed for archaeological excavations to be any longer adventure in the unknown but rational conquest of knowledge, based on accurate and verifiable scientific methods, which have diffused and are now universally accepted. Of course, there is a lot of variants in the way to proceed, that, however, always and everywhere meet the standards for an objective and scientific character of the results achieved. Thus, we can say that the kind of archaeology that we have defined historically inspired allowed, in general terms, that have to be specified and can be modified in secondary aspects, the reconstruction, for the most ancient phases of the history of the humankind, in the so-called prehistory, of the physical and mental developments of men from the earlier phases to the appearance of Homo Sapiens to the first steps towards the more developed phases of social complexity. Similarly, the fundamental steps of the development, in the late prehistory, of a progressively more elaborated forms of social aggregation and economic organization, have been identified, from the domestication of plants and animals to the foundation of villages and the first forms of cult, in those periods, which are defined as the Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic, referring to the invention of the fundamental tools of social life that are clay vessels fired in furnaces. Those studies have also led to define complex and still debated dynamics that, bringing to an end to the last phases of prehistory, brought to the formation of the first cities and territorial states, a phenomenon which have often been defined as the “urban revolution”, that, with the fundamental invention of writing, the specialization of activities and social stratification, laid the basis for the flourishing of the great ancient civilizations. At the same time, historical archaeologies, due to the wide proliferation of excavations carried out scientifically almost all over the world, have obtained noteworthy results in deepening the knowledge on many aspects of the material culture of the great civilizations of the past in historical times. However, the system of studies and knowledge of traditional archeology, that had nonetheless achieved results which could not be expected just a century before on the development of the earliest humankind and of the historical civilizations almost all over the world, was questioned during the 60s, by a new, innovative, movement of thought, which was called the New Archaeology. Such a name had been chosen explicitly in contrast with the Old Archaeology, that is traditional archaeology. That was considered not only antiquated and outdated in themes, methods and aims, but was also impeded due to the fact that it was considered politically non-acceptable, because it was not free and it served the authoritarians political systems of the first half of the 20th century, particularly Nazism and Fascism. We should make clear that the most fruitful and active seeds of the New Archaeology had already been established at the beginning of the 20th century, on the one hand in the Academy in the studies on the European prehistory, carried on by the main Universities in the United Kingdom, and on the other, in active sectors of the American universities involved in the study of the American Pre-Columbian civilizations. In very general terms, the British, were particularly sensitive to the study of the economy of the ancient societies, and in more general, due to the influence of Karl Marx's critical thought, maintained that the economic foundation, and particularly the mode of production, determine social structures, while the Americans, influenced by sociology and anthropology, had the same attention toward economy and society of the ancient world of any time and region, but maintained that the social organization had a primary role in determining the economic forms. Thus, it is not by chance that one of the first critics toward the traditional archaeology was that it paid too much attention to ideology and religion of past civilizations and too few to their economy and society. In fact, in Marx's thought economy is the structural element of society, while ideologies and religions are super-structural elements and the latter ones depend on and are determined by the former. The basic critics of the New Archaeology toward the Old Archaeology was that it focused on the classification of material culture, underestimating the interpretation of cultures that had produced such objects. And, in fact, it is certainly true, that the classification of objects does not imply their understanding: interpreting and understanding the ancient finds is different from their classification. Actually, the classification of finds in archeology is the necessary premise, though not sufficient, of a cycle of studies that is not completed until interpretation and comprehension are accomplished. It has always been said that traditional archaeology has always been engaged in finding answers to questions such, “When?” and “Where?”, while the key questions to understand the past are “Who?”, “How?” and “Why?”. The debate against the classification and in favor of interpretation, in fact, was aimed at underlining that, within classification, that is, within the individuation of a class of objects produced in a given period, so, “When?”, in a given region(“Where?”), we cannot obtain any data on who has produced those objects and how they lived, what they were used for, so the “Why?”. The argument was that, actually, we are paradoxically not interested in the objects of the material culture that are studied in archaeology, but rather in people who had produced those objects. And such considerations were certainly right, but we should consider a thing, sometimes forgotten within the polemics that have characterized many of the critical interventions of the New Archeology: there is no interpretation without classification, that if a classification is not accomplished satisfactorily interpretation based on non-sound or wrong classification could be not only wrong but not even plausible. From such a strongly negative consideration of traditional archaeology, just simplifyng the variety of the arguments of a sustainer of the New Archaeology, three orders of particularly interesting evaluations about contemporary archaeology emerged, that are respectively, a judgment, a perspective, and a wish. The first consideration, which is judgment, is the condemnation of archaeology as it had been in general until the beginning of the New Archaeology, as a negative subject as it was served the political power, and it was devoid of any critical ability of considering the past: just to classify without interpretation and thus judgement, meant no critical acceptation of the past and to behave the same way toward the present, the negative present of the authoritatian regimes of the 20th century. The lack of critical abilities towards the past and the present meant to be accomplices of the worst present: such a negative judgement on archaeology as a subject found certainly a reflection in the servility and acquiescence of neither secondary nor minor branches of the archaeology of the first half of the 20th century towards the authoritarian regimes of Italy and Germany in particular. The second consideration, which is a perspective, is the path that suggested by the New Archeology for the renovation of the subject: such a course was represented by the contamination with other sciences. The thought was in someway simple and consequent: if archaeology had in itself the power for a renewal, it had to look outside of itself, and adopt methods and procedures from other subjects and topics, more developed, and above all more critical, to be able to renew itself: from sociology to history of economics, from ethnology to linguistics, from philosophy to natural sciences. Instead of get closed into its own “ivory tower” in isolation, for which there was anything to proud of, because of the lack of methodology, archaeology had to search for every positive thing that could be found in other subjects. In a single word, as it was said at the time with an effective metaphor, the fate of archaeology was to “loose its innocence”, in order to survive, within an open and fruitful match with other sciences, also those ones apparently very different from archaeology. The third consideration is certainly a wish, and something more: it is felt as necessary as well problematic. Archaeology had to become a science: in the search of interpretations to understand the past, it had to undertake a path to overcome doubts and uncertainties, typical of historical subjects and humanities in general and to be, to be as concrete, sound and certain as natural sciences. Each interpretation had to be based on certainties, and, in order to make this dream come true, the methods to be employed were those of the exact sciences based on the principle of “try and try again” to verify and certify every acquisition. Such a principle is a problematic due to the fact that it is obviously not always so obvious, since, while accumulating data it is actually possible to “try and try again”, but in the history of humankind, all events are unique and these do not take place, as well known, with the same regularity as events of the natural world.
