A history of archaeological thought pdf to jpg

In the late 19th century, anthropologists like Franz Boas and Friedrich Ratzel were promoting the idea that cultures represented geographically distinct entities, each with their own characteristics that had developed largely through the chance accumulation of different traits. Д¬ulture-historical archaeology adopted the concept of 'culture' from anthropology, where cultural evolutionary ideas had also begun to be criticised.

Many felt that this variability was not comfortably explained by preexisting evolutionary paradigms. As a result of this, archaeologists had come to increasingly realise that there was a great deal of variability in the artefacts uncovered across the continent. Throughout the 19th century, an increasing amount of archaeological material had been collected in Europe, in part as a result of land reclamation projects, increased agricultural production and construction, the foundation of museums and establishment of archaeological teaching positions at universities. Historian of archaeology Bruce Trigger considered the development of culture-historical archaeology to be 'a response to growing awareness of geographical variability in the archaeological record' at a time when the belief in cultural evolutionary archaeology was declining in western and central Europe. Geographic variability and the concept of 'culture' There was also a trend that was developing among the European intelligentsia that began to oppose the concept of cultural evolutionism (that culture and society gradually evolved and progressed through stages), instead taking the viewpoint that human beings were inherently resistant to change. 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. 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 new urban working class had begun to develop a political voice through socialism, threatening the established political orders of many European states. 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. Causes Д¬ulture-historical archaeology arose during a somewhat tumultuous time in European intellectual thought. Webster noted that the second defining feature of culture-historical thought was its emphasis on classification and typologies.

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.' 2.1 Geographic variability and the concept of 'culture'.Nevertheless, elsewhere in the world, culture-historical ideas continue to dominate. 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.

Culture-historical thought would be introduced to British archaeology by the Australian archaeologist V. 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.ДЇirst developing in Germany among those archaeologists surrounding Rudolf Virchow, culture-historical ideas would later be popularised by Gustaf Kossinna. It was gradually superseded in the mid-twentieth century by processual archaeology. It originated in the late nineteenth century as cultural evolutionism began to fall out of favor with many antiquarians and archaeologists. Items from the Neolithic ' Beaker culture' the idea of defining distinct 'cultures' according to their material culture was at the core of culture-historical archaeology.Д¬ulture-historical archaeology is an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.

A history of archaeological thought pdf to jpg