For example, California archaeologists have used this approach to understand why acorns, which were a time-intensive, low-calorie food source, were widely used by many of California’s Native American groups.
Surprisingly, some of the most interesting results occur when the model predictions do not match the archaeological data. The resulting description of optimal behavior does not necessarily reflect what past humans did but does predict the choices humans would have made if they could rationally optimize their choices. These models, common in economic analyses, use data to identify optimal human behavioral patterns: which food items to include in their diets, patches in which to forage, how far to travel to hunt, etc. Processual archaeology’s lasting contribution is its use of data and scientific methods to support theoretical applications and analysis, and some of the theoretical approaches proposed, such as predictive human behavioral models, continue to be used in evolutionary ecology to predict and interpret past human behavior. Quite the opposite it is still actively used today. Processual archaeology was not scrapped despite failing to meet many of its lofty goals. This is a very simple example of how studying living societies can inform the process of interpreting past cultures, even if it is to reveal that residue analysis could be skewed by the "re-purposing" of an artifact. The broken pot is being used as a watering bowl for chickens. This is the case for the broken pottery seen in a Senegal village.
However, if the pot or part of the pot is used for a different purpose than its intended use the residue contents can be misleading. Archaeologists can learn a lot about a ceramic pot and how it was used in past cultures by examining the residues left inside. On the other hand, it may also bring to light some challenges for the archaeologist as in the case of the piece of broken ceramic below (see Figure 3.2.1). He then used that contemporary data to predict what Inuit hunting stands of the past would have looked like and to interpret hunting artifacts found in Inuit excavations. Binford, for example, accompanied Inuit hunters and studied the debris they left behind at hunting stands. This approach relies on ethnographic analogy, or interpreting the archaeological record based on similarities observed in ethnographically described cultures. Lewis Binford, an American archaeologist who is often cited as the father of processual archaeology, advocated for the importance of theory using a new technique, ethnoarchaeology, which applies ethnographic techniques used by cultural anthropologists when comparing living peoples to the archaeological record.
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