Post-processualism and the death of evidence

Last year, I published this little flow chart that seemed to me to represent the way in which MPP and his colleagues actually work.  Unwittingly, have we identified the working methods of the post-processualists?

In a recent post about "what Prof MPP thinks" we mentioned his comments about the rise and rise of post-processualism (horrible expression!) in archaeology:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/06/what-mpp-thinks.html

There is a vast literature out there, and it all gets very philosophical and convoluted; whole courses in Archaeology Departments are no doubt devoted to in-depth analyses of all the pros and cons of the processual method (stressing objectivity and the use of scientific deduction) versus the post-processual method (stressing subjectivity and the erratic nature of human behaviour).

As fellow bloggers will know, I cannot understand the cavalier attitude which MPP and his colleagues have towards hard evidence in the field -- if there is no evidence in support of a central hypothesis, never mind -- it's not really needed.  All we have to do is understand human motivation and human behaviour, and if we need to invent some evidence to support what we are saying, that's OK too.  To hell with the scientific method -- this is the ARCHAEOLOGICAL method, and nobody is going to apologise for it.  So there is a vast gulf of misunderstanding between people like me, brought up to respect science, and people like MPP, presumably brought up to try and understand why human beings occasionally do rather wacky things...........

Interestingly enough, the lack of respect for the scientific method -- including peer review and scrutiny -- seems also to spread to funding organizations and journal editors.  More than once, I have wondered, in blog posts, how on earth certain papers by the MPP team have found their way into print.

Here is one summary of the debate:
Post-Processual Archaeology - What is Culture in Archaeology Anyway?
The Radical Critique of the Processual Movement in Archaeologyhttps://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-post-processual-archaeology-172230

A summary by Kris Hirst:

Post-processual archaeology was a scientific movement in archaeological science that took place in the 1980s, and it was explicitly a critical reaction to the limitations of the previous movement, the 1960s' processual archaeology.

In brief, processual archaeology strictly used the scientific method to identify the environmental factors that influenced past human behaviors. After two decades, many archaeologists who had practiced processual archaeology, or had been taught it during their formative years, recognized that processual archaeology failed when it attempted to explain variability in past human behavior. The post-processualists rejected the deterministic arguments and logical positivist methods as being too limited to encompass the wide variety of human motivations.

And her conclusions:

The Costs and Benefits

The issues that were unearthed during the height of the post-processual movement are still not resolved, and few archaeologists would consider themselves post-processualists today. However, one outgrowth was the recognition that archaeology is a discipline that can use a contextual approach based on ethnographic studies to analyze sets of artifacts or symbols and look for evidence of belief systems. Objects may not simply be the residues of behavior, but instead, may have had a symbolic importance that archaeology can at least work at getting.

And secondly, the emphasis on objectivity, or rather the recognition of subjectivity, has not subsided. Today archaeologists still think about and explain why they chose a specific method; create multiple sets of hypotheses to make sure they aren't being fooled by a pattern; and if possible, try to find a social relevance. After all, what is science if it's not applicable to the real world?