Abstract
While internalism and externalism are nothing more than two categories coined by historians of science during the 1960s (for an introduction to the internalism-externalism debate, see: Basalla 1968; Lakatos 1970; Ben-David 1971; Agassi 1981; Morrell 1981 and Shapin 1992), they are terms often used by historians of archaeology to define the two different interpretations of the history of their discipline (e.g. Meltzer 1989: 17–18; Trigger 2001: 635; Schlanger 2004: 165–166; Trigger 2006: 25; Díaz-Andreu 2007: 4; Kaeser 2008: 10). Why have these terms proven to be so popular?