Evolutionary Archaeology: towards a loss of innocence?

Evolutionary thoughts have been applied within archaeology for over a century, but the last four decades have seen a specific manifestation of such ideas rooted in the development of the field of cultural evolutionary studies. Concepts, methods, and theories have been borrowed and adapted from biology to cultural evolutionary studies and subsequently applied to the study of the archaeological record. While these developments have loosely defined what constitutes the modern subfield of evolutionary archaeology, we argue that many of its premises fail to sufficiently engage with insights from fields such as ethnoarchaeology or explore theoretical and methodological consequences dictated by the nature of the observational data that archaeologists deal with. Here, we critically review the field of evolutionary archaeology, highlighting the relevance of under-discussed behavioural processes and inferential challenges and question what its critical self-consciousness can lead to.