The vast majority of publications on ethnoarchaeology take no explicit theoretical position – which does not mean that they are atheoretical. In this chapter we offer the reader a basic toolkit with which to examine the theory, implicit or explicit, expressed in the ethnoarchaeological literature that we will be considering in the course of this book. For two reasons the toolkit we offer at this stage is a minimal one. First, most of us prefer to deal with theoretical complexities as they arise and in a factual context. Second, this is not the place to attempt to survey the wide web of theoretical positions taken by archaeologists (and to a lesser extent ethnoarchaeologists) following an influx of theory reaching anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s from a variety of sources including the philosophy of science, literary theory, and sociology.