Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe adopted German archaeologist Gustaf Kossina’s definition of an archaeological culture, but not its racist connotations. In 1929, Childe stated that a culture was manifest archaeologically as a set of artifacts that occurred more or less completely at multiple sites. According to Childe, archaeologists assume that a complex of regularly associated artifact types is the material expression of a people. Discipline-wide use of this definition of an archaeological culture is sometimes said to mark the birth of cultural archaeology - the study of prehistoric cultures - and a shift from an antiquarian or natural historian kind of archaeology focusing on artifacts merely as curious anthropogenic phenomena. Childe’s definition was, however, not unique; a similar one existed in North America. In the Old World, archaeologists were studying the (pre) history of their genetic ancestors, whereas in the New
World archaeologists were studying the (pre)history of a group with which they shared neither history nor genes. These differences resulted in slightly different bases from which the notion of a prehistoric culture grew.
Old World Archaeological Cultures
In Childe’s view, language facilitated a culture’s transmission and accumulation. Childe believed that humans cling to old traditions and display intense reluctance to modify customary modes of behavior; innovators and nonconformists have found this out time and again through history. In Childe’s view, an anthropologist conceives of a culture as a pattern of behavior common to a group of persons or to all members of a society. The uniformity of types of artifacts in an archaeological culture reflects this conception and discloses the uniformity and rigidity of the traditions of the artifact makers. Peculiarities of the component types of an archaeological culture are determined by convention or tradition rather than function; thus an archaeological culture corresponds to a social group that carries a particular social tradition. Childe thought it would be rash to try to define precisely what sort of social group corresponds to an archaeological culture, though he believed that different sets of artifact types represented different social traditions or cultures. Further, social traditions were created by societies or groups of people and transmitted, but they were not fixed or immutable. Culture changed constantly as a society dealt with new circumstances. Finally, Childe held that a culture was an organic whole and the elements of a culture would more or less influence each other - a conception of a culture as a system.
Grahame Clark thought that the definitive criteria of prehistoric cultures would vary from case to case, but the most reliable criteria would be those capable of expressing human choice or style, rather than those controlled by ecological or economic factors. He also believed that the more numerous the definitive elements or traits, the more valid the cultural entity defined. When he said the definitive criteria vary from case to case, he meant that sometimes pottery might be sufficient, other times chipped stone or perhaps floor plans of houses. All of these might, or might not, vary stylistically. Although the term had been used without formal definition since the beginning of the twentieth century, by the middle of that century the term ‘style’ had come to denote a kind or category that corresponded to a particular geographic locality, a particular time period, or both, and mostly the last. From an archaeological perspective, in both the Old and the New Worlds, styles were transmitted culturally, more or less free of functional constraints or limits, and so could be used to map in time and space the distribution of prehistoric cultures.
In 1968, British archaeologist David Clarke remarked that culture ‘‘consists of learned modes of behavior and its material manifestations, socially transmitted from one generation to the next and from one society or individual to another.’’ Contrary to many anthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century, Clarke argued that there was no difference between the material manifestation of concepts of form and function preserved in artifacts and the social manifestations of similar concepts manifest as social activities and behaviors. Agreeing with many of those same anthropologists, Clarke thought that culture comprises a communication system of acquired beliefs that increasingly supplements the genetic aspects of humans. Culture is adaptive, is transmitted extrasomatically, and is cumulative. A culture is a system, an integrated, intercommunicating network of entities that form a complex whole. Subsystems include material culture, economic structure, religous dogma, and social organization. In Clarke’s view, the environment in which a culture exists is part of the cultural system.
The belief that archaeological cultures might not be equivalent to an ethnographer’s cultural units gained strength in the 1970s. Several individuals observed that different kinds of material culture did not all display identical or even similar geographic distributions. Groups of artifact types were, according to Childe and Clark, supposed to be distinctive of social groups comprising cultures. Yet they and Clarke recognized that groups of types were often polythetic; sometimes no amount of analysis could discern geographic clusters of particular groups of types. Childe, Clark, and Clarke suggested that the adaptive nature of culture was influencing the combinations of types rather than culture itself, implying that culture was ideational and though adaptive, culture was more stylistic choice than functional necessity.
British archaeologist Ian Hodder did ethnoarch-aeological research to test the notion that the shared ideas comprising a culture were reflected by artifacts. He found that the symbolic meaning of an artifact was contingent on variables such as the social context, economic context, functional context, and purpose of the symbol. Artifacts as cultural symbols were, in Hodder’s view, always in action, being renegotiated and re-evaluated, rather than passive, rigid, or immutable reflections of culture. In Hodder’s view, archaeologists must realize that each artifact is produced in relation to a set of symbolic schemes, and in relation to general principles of symbolic meaning that are built up into particular arrangements as part of particular social strategies. This means that efforts to identify archaeological cultures equivalent to an ethnographer’s cultures are misguided. There is no simple relationship between the flow of cultural information and material culture patterning. An archaeologist cannot predict the past based on general propositions about how cultures work; rather, an archaeologist must interpret the past by using contemporary knowledge of symbolism and ideologies. The historical context in which the artifacts (and the portion of the archaeological record) under study were created is, in Hodder’s view, critically important to learning about past cultures. This conception of culture as dynamic and under constant formation based on human actions and the contexts of those actions had a great deal of influence on subsequent archaeological research.
New World Archaeological Cultures
North American archaeology is and has historically been one of the four parts of anthropology (sociocultural, linguistic, biological, archaeological) that all focus around the culture concept. Therefore, by and large, as anthropology goes, so goes archaeology. Most anthropologists and archaeologists writing prior to 1950 used the term ‘material culture’, without definition, as a synonym for ‘artifact’ - a material item owing one or more of its attributes to human activity, usually a tool. Whether or not an artifact actually was culture was debated, many saying that artifacts were but empirical, long-lasting manifestations of cultural (extrasomatically learned) behaviors but were not culture themselves.
During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, an archaeological culture in North America was conceived of as a particular set of cultural traits, where a ‘cultural trait’ could vary tremendously in inclusiveness and was both an emic-like and an etic-like unit. Cultural traits were units of cultural transmission whatever the mode or pathway of transmission (diffusion, enculturation, etc.). They were useful for rapidly recording vanishing indigenous life-ways, and for tracking the movements of cultures or parts thereof over geographic space. Cultural traits were the operational units of the direct historical approach. Perceptions of distinct culture areas manifest as trait clusters reinforced the notion that cultures were discrete units. Archaeologists used artifact types as if they were equivalent to cultural traits; an archaeological culture comprised a particular set of artifact types; thus an archaeological culture was a more or less distinct set of cultural traits, just like an ethnographer’s cultural units were more or less distinct sets of cultural traits. Also just like with ethnography, the greater the number of artifact types shared between two archaeological assemblages of artifacts, the greater their cultural ‘affinities’.
The gist of the preceding paragraph was implicit in the literature, so in the 1940s Walter Taylor constructed an explicit discussion of the culture concept. Taylor’s advisor was Clyde Kluckhohn, who himself had strong opinions about anthropological epistemology and the culture concept. Taylor made several points. First, culture is the product of human activity; there are no nonhuman cultures. Second, culture can be considered wholistically (all human groups have it) or partitively (each human group has a more or less unique culture). Third, culture is mental or conceptual; Taylor found the concept of material culture to be ‘‘fallacious.’’ That culture comprises ideas (attitudes, beliefs, meanings, sentiments, values, interests, knowledge, etc.) means that it can be transmitted and cumulative. A culture is a set of ideas shared by a group of people; the behaviors of those people are objectifications of the shared ideas; an artifact is a possible result of the behavior and so is also an objectification of culture but is not culture itself. Finally, for Taylor (following Kluckhohn), a cultural trait is an inferred mental construct. For an anthropologist (who observes behavior) or for an archaeologist (who observes artifacts), culture is, in Taylor’s view, completely inferential because culture itself is solely mental.
Thus, arguing from slightly different bases, both Old World and New World archaeologists developed a definition of an archaeological culture as a distinctive aggregate of artifacts that (may) recur in multiple sites or strata. What, then, is an artifact aggregate and how does an archaeologist know when one has been found? Several kinds of artifact aggregates are recognized. In the Old World, an ‘industry’ may be defined as an assemblage of artifacts all made of the same material, such as stone, or bone; or, industry may be used as a synonym for assemblage. In both the Old and New Worlds, an ‘assemblage’ comprises all artifacts within a stratigraphically bounded unit. In the New World, a ‘component’ is an archaeological manifestation of a culture; it may consist of one or more assemblages. A component usually is a stratigraphi-cally bounded set of artifacts (it may include one or more strata); components that share a majority of artifact types are thought to represent the same or closely related social groups such as one or more particular bands of an ethnic group. A component is sometimes thought to be more or less equivalent to a community, or a group of persons who normally reside together in face-to-face association. An archaeological ‘phase’ is often thought to be more or less equivalent to a society, which in turn comprised multiple communities, each of which was manifest archaeologically as a component.
Until the 1960s, archaeologists plotted the spatio-temporal distributions of artifact types. They had commonsensical notions of how cultures worked and how culture traits moved through time and space, thanks to their ethnologist teachers. But they had little in the way of theory to guide their explanations of the distributions of traits (artifact types), and they were concerned with making time visible. The form of artifacts was directly visible, as was the geographic distribution of each type of artifact; what could only be made visible analytically was the age of an artifact type. The primary goal of culture historians was, then, to determine the spatiotempo-ral distribution of artifact types, distinctive sets of which were referred to as cultures. Once prehistoric cultures were mapped in time and space, archaeologists intended to explain those distributions in cultural terms, particularly in terms of processes of cultural transmission such as diffusion, enculturation, migration, and the like. Culture was conceived as ideational, with material manifestations in the form of artifacts.
The conception of culture as ideological is sometimes referred to as ‘normative theory’; this conception was, in some ways, typical of archaeologists who wrote culture history. In 1962, the normative definition was discarded by Lewis Binford who noted that while the generic process of diffusion had come to be the explanation of choice, it actually explained nothing because why diffusion had occurred (whether the transmission of ideas, the movement of people, or any other mode) was not addressed. Binford advocated Leslie White’s definition of culture as humankind’s extrasomatic means of adaptation. Binford echoed White again when he (Binford) explicitly characterized a culture as a system of articulated variables that covaried. The processual change of a culture involved not a change in cultural norms but rather change in one cultural variable that relates, in Binford’s and White’s view, in a predictable and quantifiable way to changes in other variables, the latter changing in turn relative to change in the structure of the cultural system as a whole. The key variable was change in adaptation - culture changed because it was an adaptational system. The analytical challenge was to identify the catalyst for any particular adaptive change. Toward that end, Binford postulated that artifacts could be categorized as belonging to one of three basic groups (technomic, sociotechnic, and ideo-technic) that would reflect White’s three cultural subsystems (technology, social structure, and ideology, respectively). This line of reasoning was not, however, pursued by practitioners of the processual archaeology that Binford spawned; instead, they adopted the narrow definition of culture as an adaptive system and, in a sense, focused on the technomic category.
Binford’s alteration of the concept of culture - with no attendant change in the conception of how a culture is manifest archaeologically - prompted much innovative research. Some focused on how change in one social variable resulted in change in other social variables (as manifest in design elements on ceramics); to do this, analysts adopted the normative definition of culture. Other researchers focused on a culture as an adaptive system. The latter became the approach preferred by processual archaeologists of the 1970s and 1980s, though ‘adaptation’ became something of a universal explanation much like diffusion had earlier been. These archaeologists adopted the White/Binford definition of culture as an adaptive system. Seldom in the literature of the 1960s through the 1980s were the two conceptions used by the same researcher.
Some American archaeologists did not adopt Bin-ford’s definition, but instead focused on culture as ideational. An early member of this group was James Deetz, who did not offer a definition of culture but who advocated a more sophisticated version of normative theory. Deetz explicitly stated that adopting the view that an artifact was a concrete expression of a ‘mental template’ held in the mind of the artisan would allow archaeologists to reconstruct the culture of the makers of the object in question. The implication that culture is ideological - a mental template was equivalent to a conceptual norm - was reinforced when Deetz noted that the attributes displayed by artifacts were equivalent to a linguist’s allophones, and that the combination of these attributes into culturally meaningful units manifest as artifacts was very similar to the isolation of morphemes and their constituent allomorphs. While not adopting Deetz’s linguist metaphor, other American archaeologists tended to agree that culture was mental but nevertheless could be accessed through the archaeological record. This sort of thinking eventually developed into postprocessual archaeology (see Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology).
Summary
In Europe, archaeology concerns history projected back into the past. Ethnic variants correspond with linguistic, social, cultural, and biological variants. A culture is an integrated, cohesive whole; cultural change (temporal variation) is therefore abrupt or saltational. In (North) America, archaeology is a part of anthropology. Cultures are continuous geographically until there is major environmental change. A culture lacks cohesion (except geographically) and comprises a hodgepodge of cultural traits. Culture is independent of ethnicity, language, society, and biology. Cultures blend temporally, so change can be autochthonous (internal) and gradual or, if immigration occurs, saltational. How to distinguish the two archaeologically is an analytical challenge.
World History
