The history of archaeology clearly demonstrates the presence of both continuity and discontinuity, but does it also demonstrate a process of a coming from and a going towards an enhanced capacity to understand the history of humanity? In one sense there can be little doubt that there is a great deal more empirical information available to contemporary archaeologists than it was to our forebears. By extension, the goal of deploying such information to explore core historical questions of who, when, where, why, and what should also imply an increasingly close connection between the empirical and the theoretical, with the result that the value of our theoretical resources might be explicitly assessed in other than circular terms. I argue that the history of archaeology indicates that this is not the case, with there being a widening gulf between the instruments we use to create information, and the theories we deploy to make sense of it. Viewed from this perspective we might instead that observe that this disjunction between theory and the empirical has been the most significant continuity in the history of archaeology.