Since archaeologists and historians have a common interest in the human past, their continuing capacity to ignore each other's existence is rather surprising. To some extent this is because each lives up to the other's caricature: one apparently obsessed with the trivial detail of pottery classification, the other with the equally trivial (but more readable) details of personal lives. To the extent that this is true, New Archaeology was the great breakout from the first stereotype; Braudelian history from the second. Archaeologists, typically, took fifteen years longer.

Of course there had been many earlier works both of history and archaeology which far transcended these stereotypes; but from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge there is a striking similarity in the common rhythm which underlay the post-war development of innovative work in both disciplines. What both Binfordians and Braudelians had in common was a powerful, self-conscious determination to be seen as the dominant school of interpretation within their own disciplines, which ultimately led to their successful capture of a secure academic territory with its publications, pupils, and imitators. Both saw themselves as leading a major theoretical reorientation with more relevance to post-war society, replacing a redundant generation of scholars concerned simply with the collection of disconnected facts! Both expressed an impatience with narrative, and espoused a broadly ecological and demographic standpoint, subsuming individuals within broader social forces, and trying to quantify whatever was capable of being measured (while tending to ignore what could not).