A Tale of Two Countries: Contrasting Archaeological Culture History in British and French Archaeology

Abstract

The definition of an archaeological culture and its subsequent application throughout Europe during the first half of the twentieth century tends to be presented as a straightforward process. Scholars in each country simply adopted ideas advocated by Gustaf Kossinna (e.g. Kossinna 1911) and V. Gordon Childe (e.g. Childe 1925) to create a mosaic of archaeological cultures which continue to structure the archaeological record. When surveying the varying directions of archaeological theory in Europe, culture-history is portrayed as a traditional and deeply flawed approach that is unusually stubborn in refusing to be consigned to oblivion, despite the presence of newer and fresher processual and post-processual theories (e.g. papers in Hodder 1991; Ucko 1995; Biehl et al. 2002). Yet, the methodology underlying archaeological cultures and their interpretation varied considerably, and each country subsequently experienced very different trajectories in the development of culture histories. At one extreme, this locally contingent development has led to the majority of archaeologists in Britain to reject culture-historical traditions while in neighbouring France archaeological cultures are still regarded as an essential tool for the spatial and temporal classification of the archaeological record. In this frequently difficult and distant relationship (Scarre 1999), the British regard much of the archaeology done in France as having been conducted within an outdated framework; yet, they predominantly derive their theoretical approaches from translations of theories by French sociologists and anthropologists. In order to explore the underlying reasons for this apparent archaeological paradox, it is necessary to compare the development of the culture-history perspective and archaeological culture structure within Britain and France, and to trace the changes and continuities in each nation.