Conclusion

Over the years, numerous ethnologists and archaeologists pondered the likelihood that an archaeological culture as defined by Childe was equivalent to a social unit that an anthropologist would categorize as a culture. Most archaeologists agree that an archaeological culture manifest as a set of artifacts represents a social group; it is the nature of that group and its relationship to an ethnologist’s culture that is the point of contention. In practice, most archaeologists still speak of this or that ‘archaeological culture’ and use (typically implicitly) Childe’s definition. This is likely because Childe’s is a pragmatic definition that has analytical value. What archaeology consistently needs more of are explicit theories that describe the myriad relations between artifacts and culture.

Theories are the tinted glass through which we view, interpret, explain, and come to understand how the world works. An ethnographer’s cultures are not bounded, autonomous entities, to various degrees and at various rates they exchange traits, information, members, materials, and so on not only across geographic space but through time. Yet even recognizing this, archaeologists still make reference to standard archaeological cultures such as Woodland, Chumash, Mousterian, and the like. The key to avoiding the reification of individual cultures is to keep in mind that a culture is an analytical unit and to realize that cultural units are differentially discrete, bounded, autonomous. For some analytical purposes, they might be treated as perfectly discrete; for others, the frequency or magnitude of intercultural contact or interaction may be a central consideration. Units of culture (partitive) can be explained with the assistance of a relevant definition of culture (wholis-tic), where relevance derives from an analytical problem, hypothesis, or theory. The culture concept will continue to be discussed, dismantled, debated, and resurrected in new forms by anthropologists. Archaeologists will continue to borrow those resurrections and to discuss prehistoric cultures manifest as distinctive sets of artifacts. Whatever conception culture takes, it should facilitate analytical work.

Seealso: Anthropological Archaeology; Historic Roots of Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Pro-cessual Archaeology; Social Theory.