Anthropology is a discipline of the social sciences, as I'm sure I don't need to explain. It's sister disciplines, sociology and psychology, also deal with human beings but from slightly different points of view. The post-processualists believe that agency and free will are important and are overlooked by the processual method. That because of free will, we can't truly reconstruct a culture from the archaeological record, that it's all just biased interpretation. Post-processualists such as Ian Hodder criticized the processualists as getting too involved with the Archaeometry of it all and ignoring the stuff of man--the behavior, the gender, the culture of people. Naturally, the processualists think the post-processualists go too far.

Post-Processualists emphasize study of patterns in material culture and insist that archaeologists can extract meaningful inferences about values, beliefs, religion, and social structure, as well as the more obvious socioeconomic or technological elements of human adaptation. Archaeology for Post-Processualists is often defined as the anthropology of material culture, and encompasses but is not limited to Materialist positivistic approaches to study of past societies. Post-Processual approaches build on Culture History and on the New Archaeology of the Processualist school, but seek to broaden the field of study dramatically.