Settlement Patterns - Studying Society's Evolution (thoughtco.

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Settlement Patterns - Studying the Evolution of Societies

Settlement Patterns in Archaeology Are All About Living Together

 Panoramic aerial view from on high of oldest town in Corfu - ancient mountain village of Old Perithia
nestled in mountains, Greece. Tim Graham / Getty Images Europe / Getty Images

By  K. Kris Hirst

Updated January 24, 2020

In the scientific field of archaeology, the term "settlement pattern" refers to the evidence within a given
region of the physical remnants of communities and networks. That evidence is used to interpret the
way interdependent local groups of people interacted in the past. People have lived and interacted
together for a very long time, and settlement patterns have been identified dating back to as long as
humans have been on our planet.

Key Takeaways: Settlement Patterns

 The study of settlement patterns in archaeology involves a set of techniques and analytical
methods to examine the cultural past of a region. 

 The method allows examination of sites in their contexts, as well as interconnectedness and
change across time. 

 Methods include surface survey assisted by aerial photography and LiDAR. 

Anthropological Underpinnings

Settlement pattern as a concept was developed by social geographers in the late 19th century. The term
referred then to how people live across a given landscape, in particular, what resources (water, arable
land, transportation networks) they chose to live by and how they connected with one another: and the
term is still a current study in geography of all flavors.

According to American archaeologist Jeffrey Parsons, settlement patterns in anthropology began with

the late 19th-century work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan who was interested in how modern
Pueblo societies were organized. American anthropologist Julian Steward published his first work on
aboriginal social organization in the American southwest in the 1930s: but the idea was first extensively
used by archaeologists Phillip Phillips, James A. Ford and James B. Griffin in the Mississippi Valley of the
United States during World War II, and by Gordon Willey in the Viru Valley of Peru in the first decades
after the war.

What led to that was the implementation of a regional surface survey, also called pedestrian survey,
archaeological studies not focused on a single site, but rather on an extensive area. Being able to
systematically identify all the sites within a given region means archaeologists can look at not just how
people lived at any one time, but rather how that pattern changed through time. Conducting regional
survey means you can investigate the evolution of communities, and that's what archaeological
settlement pattern studies do today.
Patterns Versus Systems
Archaeologists refer to both settlement pattern studies and settlement system studies, sometimes
interchangeably. If there is a difference, and you could argue about that, it might be that pattern studies
look at the observable distribution of sites, while system studies look at how the people living at those
sites interacted: modern archaeology can't really do one with the other.

History of Settlement Pattern Studies

Settlement pattern studies were first conducted using regional survey, in which archaeologists
systematically walked over hectares and hectares of land, typically within a given river valley. But the
analysis only truly became feasible after remote sensing was developed, beginning with photographic
methods such as those used by Pierre Paris at Oc Eo but now, of course, using satellite imagery and
drones.

Modern settlement pattern studies combine with satellite imagery, background research, surface
survey, sampling, testing, artifact analysis, radiocarbon, and other dating techniques. And, as you might
imagine, after decades of research and advances in technology, one of the challenges of settlement
patterns studies has a very modern ring to it: big data. Now that GPS units and artifact and
environmental analysis are all intertwined, how to do you analyze the huge amounts of data that are
collected?

By the end of the 1950s, regional studies had been performed in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and
Mesopotamia; but they have since expanded throughout the world.

New Technologies

Although systematic settlement patterns and landscape studies are practiced in many diverse
environments, before modern imaging systems, archaeologists attempting to study heavily vegetated
areas were not as successful as they might have been. A variety of means to penetrate the gloom have
been identified, including the use of high definition aerial photography, subsurface testing, and, if
acceptable, deliberately clearing the landscape of growth. 

LiDAR (light detection and ranging), a technology used in archaeology since the turn of the 21st century,
is a remote sensing technique that is conducted with lasers connected to a helicopter or drone. The
lasers visually pierce the vegetative cover, mapping huge settlements and revealing previously unknown
details that can be ground-truthed. Successful use of LiDAR technology has included mapping the
landscapes of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Stonehenge world heritage site in England, and previously
unknown Maya sites in Mesoamerica, all providing insight for regional studies of settlement patterns.

Selected Sources

 Curley, Daniel, John Flynn, and Kevin Barton. "Bouncing Beams Reveal Hidden
Archaeology." Archaeology Ireland 32.2 (2018): 24–29.
  Feinman, Gary M. "Settlement and Landscape Archaeology." International Encyclopedia of the
Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition). Ed. Wright, James D. Oxford: Elsevier, 2015. 654–
58, doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.13041-7

 Golden, Charles, et al. "Reanalyzing Environmental Lidar Data for Archaeology: Mesoamerican
Applications and Implications." Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 9 (2016): 293–308,
doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2016.07.029

 Grosman, Leore. "Reaching the Point of No Return: The Computational Revolution in

Archaeology." Annual Review of Anthropology 45.1 (2016): 129–45, doi:10.1146/annurev-
anthro-102215-095946

 Hamilton, Marcus J., Briggs Buchanan, and Robert S. Walker. "Scaling the Size, Structure, and
Dynamics of Residentially Mobile Hunter-Gatherer Camps." American Antiquity 83.4 (2018):
701-20, doi:10.1017/aaq.2018.39

Ethnoarchaeology
By 

K. Kris Hirst

Updated January 30, 2019

Ethnoarchaeology is a research technique that involves using information from

living cultures—in the form of ethnology, ethnography, ethnohistory, and
experimental archaeology—to understand patterns found at an archaeological
site. An ethnoarchaeologist acquires evidence about ongoing activities in any
society and uses those studies to draw analogies from modern behavior to explain
and better understand patterns seen in archaeological sites.
Key Takeaways: Ethnoarchaeology

 Ethnoarchaeology is a research technique in archaeology that uses present-

day ethnographic information to inform remains of sites. 
 Applied first in the late 19th century and at its height in the 1980s and
1990s, the practice has decreased in the 21st century.
 The problem is what it's always been: the application of oranges (living
cultures) to apples (ancient past). 
 Benefits include the amassing of huge quantities of information about
production techniques and methodologies.
American archaeologist Susan Kent defined ethnoarchaeology's purpose as "to
formulate and test archaeologically oriented and/or derived methods,
hypotheses, models and theories with ethnographic data." But it is archaeologist
Lewis Binford who wrote most clearly: ethnoarchaeology is a "Rosetta stone: a
way of translating the static material found on an archaeological site into the
vibrant life of a group of people who in fact left them there."
Practical Ethnoarchaeology
Ethnoarchaeology is typically conducted by using the cultural anthropological
methods of participant observation, but it also finds behavioral data in
ethnohistorical and ethnographic reports as well as oral history. The basic
requirement is to draw on strong evidence of any kind for describing artifacts and
their interactions with people in activities.

Ethnoarchaeological data can be found in published or unpublished written

accounts (archives, field notes, etc.); photographs; oral history; public or private
collections of artifacts; and of course, from observations deliberately made for
archaeological purposes on a living society. American archaeologist Patty Jo
Watson argued that ethnoarchaeology should also include experimental
archaeology. In experimental archaeology, the archaeologist creates the situation
to be observed rather than taking it where he or she finds it: observations are still
made of archaeological relevant variables within a living context.

Edging Towards a Richer Archaeology

The possibilities of ethnoarchaeology brought in a flood of ideas about what
archaeologists could say about the behaviors represented in the archaeological
record: and a corresponding earthquake of reality about the ability of
archaeologists to recognize all or even any of the social behaviors that went on in
an ancient culture. Those behaviors must be reflected in the material culture (I
made this pot this way because my mother made it this way; I traveled fifty miles
to get this plant because that's where we've always gone). But that underlying
reality may only be identifiable from the pollen and potsherds if the techniques
allow their capture, and careful interpretations appropriately fit the situation.

Archaeologist Nicholas David described the sticky issue pretty clearly:

ethnoarchaeology is an attempt to cross the divide between the ideational order
(the unobservable ideas, values, norms, and representation of the human mind)
and the phenomenal order (artifacts, things affected by human action and
differentiated by matter, form, and context).

Processual and Post-Processual Debates

The ethnoarchaeological study reinvented the study of archaeology, as the science
edged into the post-World War II scientific age. Instead of simply finding better
and better ways to measure and source and examine artifacts (a.k.a. processual
archaeology), archaeologists felt they could now make hypotheses about the
kinds of behaviors those artifacts represented (post-processual archaeology).
That debate polarized the profession for much of the 1970s and 1980s: and while
the debates have ended, it became clear that the match is not perfect.
For one thing, archaeology as a study is diachronic—a single archaeological site
always includes evidence of all the cultural events and behaviors that might have
taken place at that location for hundreds or thousands of years, not to mention
the natural things that happened to it over that time. In contrast, ethnography is
synchronic—what is being studied is what happens during the course of the
research. And there's always this underlying uncertainty: can the patterns of
behavior that are seen in modern (or historical) cultures really be generalized to
ancient archaeological cultures, and how much?

History of Ethnoarchaeology
Ethnographic data was used by some late 19th century/early 20th century
archaeologists to understand archaeological sites (Edgar Lee Hewett leaps to
mind), but the modern study has its roots in the post-war boom of the 1950s and
60s. Beginning in the 1970s, a huge burgeoning of literature explored the
potentialities of the practice (the processual/post-processual debate driving
much of that). There is some evidence, based on the decrease in the number of
university classes and programs, that ethnoarchaeology, although an accepted,
and perhaps standard practice for most archaeological studies in the late 20th
century, is fading in importance in the 21st.

Modern Critiques
Since its first practices, ethnoarchaeology has often come under criticism for
several issues, primarily for its underpinning assumptions about how far the
practices of a living society can reflect the ancient past. More recently, scholars as
archaeologists Olivier Gosselain and Jerimy Cunningham have argued that
western scholars are blinded by assumptions about living cultures. In particular,
Gosselain argues that ethnoarchaeology doesn't apply to prehistory because it
isn't practiced as ethnology--in other words, to properly apply cultural templates
derived from living people you can't simply pick up technical data.

But Gosselain also argues that doing a full ethnological study would not be useful
expenditure of time, since equating present-day societies are never going to be
sufficiently applicable to the past. He also adds that although ethnoarchaeology
may no longer be a reasonable way to conduct research, the main benefits of the
study has been to amass a huge amount of data on production techniques and
methodologies, which can be used as a reference collection for scholarship.

Selected Sources
  Cunningham, Jerimy J., and Kevin M. McGeough. "The Perils of Ethnographic
Analogy. Parallel Logics in Ethnoarchaeology and Victorian Bible Customs
Books." Archaeological Dialogues 25.2 (2018): 161–89. Print.
 González-Urquijo, J., S. Beyries, and J. J. Ibáñez. "Ethnoarchaeology and
Functional Analysis." Use-Wear and Residue Analysis in Archaeology. Eds. Marreiros,
João Manuel, Juan F. Gibaja Bao and Nuno Ferreira Bicho. Manuals in
Archaeological Method, Theory and Technique: Springer International
Publishing, 2015. 27–40. Print.
 Gosselain, Olivier P. "To Hell with Ethnoarchaeology!" Archaeological Dialogues
23.2 (2016): 215–28. Print.
 Kamp, Kathryn, and John Whittaker. "Editorial Reflections: Teaching
Science with Ethnoarchaeology and Experimental Archaeology."
Ethnoarchaeology 6.2 (2014): 79–80. Print.
 Parker, Bradley J. "Bread Ovens, Social Networks and Gendered Space: An
Ethnoarchaeological Study of Tandir Ovens in Southeastern Anatolia ." American
Antiquity 76.4 (2011): 603–27. Print.
 Politis, Gustavo. "Reflections on Contemporary Ethnoarchaeology." Pyrenae  46 (2015).
Print.
 Schiffer, Michael Brian. "Contributions of Ethnoarchaeology." The Archaeology of
Science. Vol. 9. Manuals in Archaeological Method, Theory and Technique:
Springer International Publishing, 2013. 53–63. Print.

Cite this Article 

Processual Archaeology
The New Archaeology's Application of the Scientific Method

John Atherton / CC/ Flickr

By  K. Kris Hirst

Updated August 12, 2018

Processual archaeology was an intellectual movement of the 1960s, known then as the "new
archaeology", which advocated logical positivism as a guiding research philosophy, modeled on
the scientific method—something that had never been applied to archaeology before.

The processualists rejected the cultural-historical notion that culture was a set of norms held by a group
and communicated to other groups by diffusion and instead argued that the archaeological remains of
culture were the behavioral outcome of a population's adaptation to specific environmental conditions.
It was time for a New Archaeology that would leverage the scientific method to find and make clear the
(theoretical) general laws of cultural growth in the way that societies responded to their environment.

New Archaeology
The New Archaeology stressed theory formation, model building, and hypothesis testing in the search
for general laws of human behavior. Cultural history, the processualists argued, wasn't repeatable: it is
fruitless to tell a story about a culture's change unless you are going to test its inferences. How do you
know a culture history you've built is correct? In fact, you can be gravely mistaken but there were no
scientific grounds to rebut that. The processualists explicitly wanted to go beyond the cultural-historical
methods of the past (simply building a record of changes) to focus on the processes of culture (what
kinds of things happened to make that culture).

There's also an implied redefinition of what culture is. Culture in processual archaeology is conceived
primarily as the adaptive mechanism that enables people to cope with their environments. Processual
culture was seen as a system composed of subsystems, and the explanatory framework of all of those
systems was cultural ecology, which in turn provided the basis for hypotheticodeductive models that the
processualists could test.

New Tools

To strike out in this new archaeology, the processualists had two tools: ethnoarchaeology and the
rapidly burgeoning varieties of statistical techniques, part of the "quantitative revolution" experienced
by all sciences of the day, and one impetus for today's "big data". Both of these tools still operate in
archaeology: both were embraced first during the 1960s.

Ethnoarchaeology is the use of archaeological techniques on abandoned villages, settlements, and sites
of living people. The classic processual ethnoarchaeological study was Lewis Binford's examination of
the archaeological remains left by mobile Inuit hunters and gatherers (1980). Binford was explicitly
looking for evidence of patterned repeatable processes, a "regular variability" that might be looked for
and found represented on archaeological sites left by Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.

With the scientific approach aspired to by processualists came a need for lots of data to examine.
Processual archaeology came about during the quantitative revolution, which included an explosion of
sophisticated statistical techniques fueled by growing computing powers and growing access to them.
Data collected by processualists (and still today) included both material culture characteristics (like
artifact sizes and shapes and locations), and data from ethnographic studies about historically known
population makeups and movements. Those data were used to build and eventually test a living group's
adaptations under specific environmental conditions and thereby to explain prehistoric cultural systems.

Subdisciplinary Specialization

Processualists were interested in the dynamic relationships (causes and effects) that operate among the
components of a system or between systematic components and the environment. The process was by
definition repeated and repeatable: first, the archaeologist observed phenomena in the archaeological
or ethnoarchaeological record, then they used those observations to form explicit hypotheses about the
connection of that data to the events or conditions in the past that might have caused those
observations. Next, the archaeologist would figure out what kind of data might support or reject that
hypothesis, and finally, the archaeologist would go out, collect more data, and find out if the hypothesis
was a valid one. If it was valid for one site or circumstance, the hypothesis could be tested in another
one.
The search for general laws quickly became complicated, because there were so much data and so much
variability depending on what the archaeologist studied. Rapidly, archaeologists found themselves in
subdisciplinary specializations to be able to cope: spatial archaeology dealt with spatial relationships at
every level from artifacts to settlement patterns; regional archaeology sought to understand trade and
exchange within a region; intersite archaeology sought to identify and report on sociopolitical
organization and subsistence; and intrasite archaeology intended to understand human activity
patterning.

Benefits and Costs of Processual Archaeology

Prior to processual archaeology, archaeology was not typically seen as a science, because the conditions
on one site or feature are never identical and so by definition not repeatable. What the New
Archaeologists did was make the scientific method practical within its limitations.

However, what processual practitioners found was that the sites and cultures and circumstances varied
too much to be simply a reaction to environmental conditions. It was a formal, unitarian principle that
archaeologist Alison Wylie called the "paralyzing demand for certainty". There had to be other things
going on, including human social behaviors that had nothing to do with environmental adaptations.

The critical reaction to processualism born in the 1980s was called post-processualism, which is a
different story but no less influential on archaeological science today.

Sources

 Some Comments on Historical versus Processual Archaeology . Southwestern Journal of

Binford LR. 1968. 

Anthropology 24(3):267-275.

 American Antiquity 45(1):4-20.
Binford LR. 1980. Willow smoke and dog's tails: Hunter gatherer settlement systems and archaeological site formation. 

 Processual Archaeology
Earle TK, Preucel RW, Brumfiel EM, Carr C, Limp WF, Chippindale C, Gilman A, Hodder I, Johnson GA, Keegan WF et al. 1987. 

and the Radical Critique [and Comments and Reply] . Current Anthropology 28(4):501-538.

 The Potential of Analogy in Post-Processual Archaeologies: A Case Study from

Fewster KJ. 2006. 

Basimane Ward, Serowe, Botswana. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute  12(1):61-87.

 Kobylinski Z, Lanata JL, and Yacobaccio HD. 1987.  On Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique.  Current
Anthropology 28(5):680-682.

 A Consideration of Some Processual Designs for Archaeology as

Kushner G. 1970. 

Anthropology. American Antiquity 35(2):125-132.

 Patterson TC. 1989.  History and the Post-Processual Archaeologies . Man  24(4):555-566.

 Wylie A. 1985.  The Reaction against Analogy. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8:63-111.
Post-Processual Archaeology - What is Culture in Archaeology
Anyway?

The Radical Critique of the Processual Movement in

Archaeology
By  K. Kris Hirst

Updated June 05, 2019

Post-processual archaeology was a scientific movement in archaeological science

that took place in the 1980s, and it was explicitly a critical reaction to the
limitations of the previous movement, the 1960s' processual archaeology.
In brief, processual archaeology strictly used the scientific method to identify the
environmental factors that influenced past human behaviors. After two decades,
many archaeologists who had practiced processual archaeology, or had been
taught it during their formative years, recognized that processual archaeology
failed when it attempted to explain variability in past human behavior. The post-
processualists rejected the deterministic arguments and logical positivist
methods as being too limited to encompass the wide variety of human
motivations.
A Radical Critique
Most particularly, the "radical critique," as post-processualism was characterized
in the 1980s, rejected the positivist search for general laws that govern behavior.
Instead, practitioners suggested that archaeologists pay more attention to
symbolic, structural, and Marxist perspectives.

The symbolic and structural post-processualist archaeology had its birth

primarily in England with the scholar Ian Hodder: some scholars such as
Zbigniew Kobylinski and colleagues referred to it as the "Cambridge school." In
texts such as Symbols in Action, Hodder argued that the word "culture" had
become almost embarrassing to the positivists who were ignoring that facts that
although material culture might reflect environmental adaptation, it also might
reflect social variability. The functional, adaptive prism that the positivists used
blinded them to the glaring blank spots in their research.

The post-processualists said culture couldn't be reduced down to a set of outside

forces like environmental change, but rather operates as a multi-varied organic
response to everyday realities. Those realities are made up of a multitude of
political, economic, and social forces that are, or at least seemed to be, specific to
a specific group in a specific time and situation, and were nowhere near as
predictable as the processualists assumed.
Symbols and Symbolism
At the same time, the post-processualist movement saw an incredible blossoming
of ideas some of which were aligned with social deconstruction and post-
modernism and grew out of the civil unrest in the west during the Vietnam war.
Some archaeologists viewed the archaeological record as a text which needed to
be decoded. Others focused on Marxist concerns about the relations of power and
domination, not just in the archaeological record but in the archaeologist him or
herself. Who should be able to tell the story of the past?

Underlying all of that was also a movement to challenge the authority of the
archaeologist and focus on identifying the biases which grew out of his or her
gender or ethnic make-up. One of the beneficial outgrowths of the movement,
then, was towards creating a more inclusive archaeology, an increase in the
number of indigenous archaeologists in the world, as well as women, the LGBT
community, and local and descendant communities. All of these brought a
diversity of new considerations into a science that had been dominated by white,
privileged, western outsider males.

Critiques of the Critique

The stunning breadth of ideas, however, became a problem. American
archaeologists Timothy Earle and Robert Preucel argued that radical
archaeology, without a focus on research methodology, was going nowhere. They
called for a new behavioral archaeology, a method that combined the processual
approach committed to explaining cultural evolution, but with a renewed focus
on the individual.

American archaeologist Alison Wylie said that post-processual ethnoarchaeology

had to learn to combine the methodological excellence of the processualists with
the ambition to explore how people in the past engaged with their material
culture. And American Randall McGuire warned against post-processual
archaeologists picking and choosing snippets from a wide range of social theories
without developing a coherent, logically consistent theory.

The Costs and Benefits

The issues that were unearthed during the height of the post-processual
movement are still not resolved, and few archaeologists would consider
themselves post-processualists today. However, one outgrowth was the
recognition that archaeology is a discipline that can use a contextual approach
based on ethnographic studies to analyze sets of artifacts or symbols and look for
evidence of belief systems. Objects may not simply be the residues of behavior,
but instead, may have had a symbolic importance that archaeology can at least
work at getting.

And secondly, the emphasis on objectivity, or rather the recognition

of subjectivity, has not subsided. Today archaeologists still think about and
explain why they chose a specific method; create multiple sets of hypotheses to
make sure they aren't being fooled by a pattern; and if possible, try to find a social
relevance. After all, what is science if it's not applicable to the real world?
Selected Sources
 Earle, Timothy K., et al. "Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique [and Comments
and Reply]." Current Anthropology 28.4 (1987): 501–38. Print.
 Engelstad, Ericka. "Images of Power and Contradiction: Feminist Theory and Post-
Processual Archaeology." Antiquity  65.248 (1991): 502-14. Print.
 Fewster, Kathryn J. "The Potential of Analogy in Post-Processual Archaeologies: A Case
Study from Basimane Ward, Serowe, Botswana." The Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute  12.1 (2006): 61–87. Print.
 Fleming, Andrew. "Post-Processual Landscape Archaeology: A Critique." Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 16.3 (2006): 267-80. Print.
 Kobylinski, Zbigniew, Jose Luis Lanata, and Hugo Daniel Yacobaccio. " On
Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique." Current Anthropology 28.5 (1987):
680–82. Print.
 Mizoguchi, Koji. "A Future of Archaeology." Antiquity  89.343 (2015): 12-22. Print.
 Patterson, Thomas C. "History and the Post-Processual Archaeologies." Man  24.4
(1989): 555–66. Print.
 Wylie, Alison. "The Reaction against Analogy." Advances in Archaeological Method and
Theory 8 (1985): 63–111. Print.
 Yoffee, Norman and Andrew Sherratt. "Archaeological Theory: Who Sets
the Agenda?" Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
 Yu, Pei-Lin, Matthew Schmader, and James G. Enloe. "'I’m the Oldest New
Archaeologist in Town': The Intellectual Evolution of Lewis R. Binford ." Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 38 (2015): 2–7. Print.

Science, Tech, Math › Social Sciences

The Culture-Historical Approach: Social Evolution and Archaeology

What is the culture-historical approach and why was it a

bad idea?
By K. Kris Hirst

Updated April 18, 2019

The culture-historical method (sometimes called the cultural-historical method

or culture-historical approach or theory) was a way of conducting anthropological
and archaeological research that was prevalent among western scholars between
about 1910 and 1960. The underlying premise of the culture-historical approach
was that the main reason to do archaeology or anthropology at all was to build
timelines of major occurrences and cultural changes in the past for groups that
did not have written records.

The culture-historical method was developed out of the theories of historians and
anthropologists, to some degree to help archaeologists organize and comprehend
the vast amount of archaeological data that had been and was still being collected
in the 19th and early 20th centuries by antiquarians. As an aside, that hasn't
changed, in fact, with the availability of power computing and scientific advances
such as archaeo-chemistry (DNA, stable isotopes, plant residues), the amount of
archaeological data has mushroomed. Its hugeness and complexity today still
drives the development of archaeological theory to grapple with it.

Among their writings redefining archaeology in the 1950s, American

archaeologists Phillip Phillips and Gordon R. Willey (1953) provided a good
metaphor for us to understand the faulty mindset of archaeology in the first half
of the 20th century. They said that the culture-historical archaeologists were of
the opinion that the past was rather like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, that there
was a pre-existing but unknown universe which could be discerned if you
collected enough pieces and fitted them together.

Unfortunately, the intervening decades have resoundingly shown us that the

archaeological universe is in no way that tidy.

Kulturkreis and Social Evolution

The culture-historical approach is based on the Kulturkreis movement, an idea
developed in Germany and Austria in the late 1800s. Kulturkreis is sometimes
spelled Kulturkreise and transliterated as "culture circle", but means in English
something along the lines of "cultural complex". That school of thought was
generated primarily by German historians and ethnographers Fritz Graebner and
Bernhard Ankermann. In particular, Graebner had been a medieval historian as a
student, and as an ethnographer, he thought it should be possible to build
historical sequences like those available for medievalists for regions that did not
have written sources.
To be able to build cultural histories of regions for people with little or no written
records, scholars tapped into the notion of unilinear social evolution, based in
part on the ideas of American anthropologists Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward
Tyler, and German social philosopher Karl Marx. The idea (long ago debunked)
was that cultures progressed along a series of more or less fixed steps: savagery,
barbarism, and civilization. If you studied a particular region appropriately, the
theory went, you could track how the people of that region had developed (or not)
through those three stages, and thus classify ancient and modern societies by
where they were in the process of becoming civilized.
Invention, Diffusion, Migration
Three primary processes were seen as the drivers of social evolution: invention,
transforming a new idea into innovations; diffusion, the process of transmitting
those inventions from culture to culture; and migration, the actual movement of
people from one region to another. Ideas (such as agriculture or metallurgy)
might have been invented in one area and moved into adjacent areas through
diffusion (perhaps along trade networks) or by migration.

At the end of the 19th century, there was a wild assertion of what is now
considered "hyper-diffusion", that all of the innovative ideas of antiquity
(farming, metallurgy, building monumental architecture) arose in Egypt and
spread outward, a theory thoroughly debunked by the early 1900s. Kulturkreis
never argued that all things came from Egypt, but the researchers did believe
there was a limited number of centers responsible for the origin of ideas which
drove the social evolutionary progress. That too has been proven false.

Boas and Childe

The archaeologists at the heart of the adoption of the culture-historical approach
in archaeology were Franz Boas and Vere Gordon Childe. Boas argued that you
could get at the culture-history of a pre-literate society by using detailed
comparisons of such things as artifact assemblages, settlement patterns, and art
styles. Comparing those things would allow archaeologists to identify similarities
and differences and to develop the cultural histories of major and minor regions
of interest at the time.

Childe took the comparative method to its ultimate limits, modeling the process
of the inventions of agriculture and metal-working from eastern Asia and their
diffusion throughout the Near East and eventually Europe. His astoundingly
broad-sweeping research led later scholars to go beyond the culture-historical
approaches, a step Childe did not live to see.
Archaeology and Nationalism: Why We Moved On
The culture-historical approach did produce a framework, a starting point on
which future generations of archaeologists could build, and in many cases,
deconstruct and rebuild. But, the culture-historical approach has many
limitations. We now recognize that evolution of any kind is never linear, but
rather bushy, with many different steps forward and backward, failures and
successes that are part and parcel of all human society. And frankly, the height of
"civilization" identified by researchers in the late 19th century is by today's
standards shockingly moronic: civilization was that which is experienced by
white, European, wealthy, educated males. But more painful than that, the
culture-historical approach feeds directly into nationalism and racism.

By developing linear regional histories, tying them to modern ethnic groups, and
classifying the groups on the basis of how far along the linear social evolutionary
scale they had reached, archaeological research fed the beast of Hitler's "master
race" and justified the imperialism and forcible colonization by Europe of the rest
of the world. Any society that hadn't reached the pinnacle of "civilization" was by
definition savage or barbaric, a jaw-droppingly idiotic idea. We know better now.
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Kluchhohn and S. A. Sieber. American Sociological Review 5(2):282-284.
 Heine-Geldern R. 1964. One
Hundred Years of Ethnological Theory in the German-Speaking Countries:
Some Milestones. Current Anthropology 5(5):407-418.
 Kohl PL. 1998. Nationalism
and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the
Reconstructions of the Remote past. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:223-246.
 Michaels GH. 1996. Culture historical theory. In: Fagan BM, editor. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. New
York: Oxford University Press. p 162.
 Phillips P, and Willey GR. 1953. Method
and Theory in American Archeology: An Operational Basis for
Culture-Historical Integration. American Anthropologist 55(5):615-633.
 Trigger BG. 1984. Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist . Man 19(3):355-370.
 Willey GR, and Phillips P. 1955. Method
and theory in American archaeology II: Historical-
Developmental interpretation. American Anthropologist 57:722-819.