Culture-historical archaeology

Culture-historical archaeology is an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.

It originated in the late nineteenth century as cultural evolutionism began to fall out of favor with many antiquarians and archaeologists. It was gradually superseded in the mid-twentieth century by processual archaeology. Cultural-historical archaeology had in many cases been influenced by a nationalist political agenda, being utilised to prove a direct cultural and/or ethnic link from prehistoric and ancient peoples to modern nation-states, something that has in many respects been disproved by later research and archaeological evidence.

First developing in Germany among those archaeologists surrounding Rudolf Virchow, culture-historical ideas would later be popularised by Gustaf Kossinna. Culture-historical thought would be introduced to British archaeology by V. Gordon Childe in the late 1920s. In the United Kingdom and United States, culture-history came to be supplanted as the dominant theoretical paradigm in archaeology during the 1960s, with the rise of processual archaeology. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the world, culture-historical ideas continue to dominate.

Webster remarked that the defining feature of culture-historical archaeology was its "statements which reveal common notions about the nature of ancient cultures; about their qualities; about how they related to the material record; and thus about how archaeologists might effectively study them."

Webster noted that the second defining feature of culture-historical thought was its emphasis on classification and typologies.

Culture-historical archaeology arose during a somewhat tumultuous time in European intellectual thought. The Industrial Revolution had spread across many nations, leading to the creation of large urban centres, most of which were filled with poverty stricken proletariat workers. This new urban working class had begun to develop a political voice through socialism, threatening the established political orders of many European states. Whilst some intellectuals had championed the Industrial Revolution as a progressive step forward, there were many who had seen it as a negative turn of events, disrupting the established fabric of society. This latter view was taken up by the Romanticist movement, which was largely made up of artists and writers, who popularised the idea of an idyllic ancient agrarian society.

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