While most anthropological cross-cultural research is conducted within a neo-evolutionist theoretical framework, archaeologists have rarely contributed to comparative anthropology. Because of the nature of their database, socio-cultural anthropologists normally use synchronic ethnographic data to develop inferential evolutionary histories. Archaeological data, which are often diachronic, are well suited to the diachronic comparison of processes of change rather than the synchronic comparison of societies. While diachronic comparison is not new to archaeology, it remains unintegrated into the subfield of comparative anthropology. Diachronic cross-cultural methods allow archaeologists to test synchronically derived theories and to search for regularities in the processes of social change.