Post-processual archaeology began in Britain during the late 1970s, spearheaded by a number of British archaeologists who had become interested in aspects of French Marxist anthropology. Most prominent among these was Ian Hodder (born 1948), a former processualist who had made a name for himself for his economic analysis of spatial patterns and early development of simulation studies, particularly relating to trade, markets and urbanization in Iron Age and Roman Britain. Having been influenced by the "New Geography" and the work of the processualist David Clarke, as his research progressed, he became increasingly sceptical that such models and simulations actually tested or proved anything, coming to the conclusion that a particular pattern in the archaeological record could be produced by a number of different simulated processes, and that there was no way to accurately test which of these alternatives was correct. In effect, he came to believe that even using the processual approach to understanding archaeological data, there were still many different ways that that data could be interpreted, and that therefore radically different conclusions could be put forward by different archaeologists, despite processualism's claim that using the scientific method it could gain objective fact from the archaeological record. As a result of this, Hodder grew increasingly critical of the processualist approach, developing an interest in how culture shaped human behaviour. He was supported in this new endeavour by many of his students, including Matthew Spriggs.