Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission

Abstract

The concept of an archaeological culture rarely features in any surveys of the literature of modern archaeology, especially in the Anglo-American world. When it does appear, cultures are treated as an anachronism – a remnant of an archaic and long-dismissed stage of the discipline. Kent Flannery’s Parable of the Golden Marshalltown provides an exemplary formulation of the unfashionable status of the archaeological culture, when the Old Timer archaeologist was sacked by his own department for his continued but apparently outdated belief in this concept (Flannery 1982). Both introductory textbooks (e.g. Johnson 1999; Hodder and Hutson 2003; Renfrew and Bahn 2008) and theoretical compilations (e.g. Preucel and Hodder 1996; Hodder 2001; Van Pool and Van Pool 2003; Funari et al. 2005; Meskell and Preucel 2006) communicate the same message: the concept of archaeological cultures is deeply flawed and, as a consequence, should no longer be applied or even discussed.