新考古学是1960年代在北美流行的一个考古学派。这个学派的发起人，是当时在芝加哥大学任教的年轻考古学家路易斯·宾佛（Lewis Binford）和他的学生朗格（William Longacre），希尔（James Hill）和佛兰内力（Kent Flannery）...等。宾佛注重研究人类活动的行为和过程，其基本主张为：“一，要对考古遗物的解释进行严格的经验检验;二，用经过严格检验的考古证据重建史前人类生活。”曾在考古学界引起巨大反响。在20世纪1980年代经考古工作者介绍到中国。

1962年宾佛在AA上发表的Arcaheology as Anthropology,他引用了Willey的话:"如果考古学不是人类学的话，那么就什么都不是"。也就是说，他的基本立场在于:相信考古学必须充分地借用人类学的理论与数据。他的中心思想可以简述为：

Processual archaeology (formerly the New Archaeology) is a form of archaeological theory that had its genesis in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archeology, 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 that "[m]y own belief is that by and by, anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing." This idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which were to answer questions about humans and human society. This was a critique of the former period in archaeology, the Culture-Historical phase in which archaeologists thought that any information which artifacts contained about past people and past ways of life was 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.