Abstract
This contribution deals with the development of archaeological theories with special focus on periods when they either endorsed or rejected evolutionary thought. The development of archaeology is divided in four basic stages: (1) from application of the notion of unilinear evolution to multilinear evolution; (2) from rejection of the idea of a general cultural evolution in a culture-historical paradigm; (3) from that point to the rise of so-called 'new archaeology' in the 1960s; (4) all the way to the fragmented present state of archaeology.