Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission

394 Pages·2011·8.43 MB·English

by  Benjamin W. Roberts

Investigating Archaeological Cultures
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Benjamin W. Roberts Marc Vander Linden
●
Editors
Investigating Archaeological
Cultures
Material Culture, Variability,
and Transmission
Editors
Benjamin W. Roberts Marc Vander Linden
Department of Prehistory and Europe School of Archaeology
The British Museum and Ancient History
London University of Leicester
UK Leicester
[email protected] UK
[email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-6969-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-6970-5
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6970-5
Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011929939
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Contents
1 Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture,
Variability, and Transmission .......................................................................... 1
Benjamin W. Roberts and Marc Vander Linden
2 A Tale of Two Countries: Contrasting Archaeological
Culture History in British and French Archaeology ............................... 23
Marc Vander Linden and Benjamin W. Roberts
3 Thoughts in Circles: Kulturkreislehre as a Hidden Paradigm
in Past and Present Archaeological Interpretations ................................ 41
Katharina C. Rebay-Salisbury
4 Cultural Innovation from an Americanist Perspective ........................... 61
Michael J. O’Brien
5 Culture in the Lower Palaeolithic: Technological Variability
in Middle Pleistocene Europe ........................................................................ 77
Hannah Fluck
6 Techno-Modes, Techno-Facies and Palaeo-Cultures:
Change and Continuity in the Pleistocene of Southeast,
Central and North Asia .................................................................................. 97
Ryan J. Rabett
7 Ancient Technology and Archaeological Cultures:
Understanding the Earliest Metallurgy in Eurasia .................................. 137
Benjamin W. Roberts
8 “Culture”, Innovation and Interaction Across Southern Iran
from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (c. 6500–3000 bc)......................... 151
Cameron A. Petrie
v
vi Contents
9 Culture, Tradition and the Settlement Burials
of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) Culture ................................................ 183
Daniela Hofmann and Penny Bickle
10 Constructing Social and Cultural Identities in the Bronze Age .......... 201
Kristian Kristiansen
11 Fine if I Do, Fine if I Don’t. Dynamics of Technical Knowledge
in Sub-Saharan Africa .................................................................................. 211
Olivier P. Gosselain
12 The Transmission of Technological Skills in the Palaeolithic:
Insights from Metapopulation Ecology..................................................... 229
Terry Hopkinson
13 Steps Towards Operationalising an Evolutionary
Archaeological Definition of Culture ......................................................... 245
Felix Riede
14 Archaeology and Cartography: In Search of the Prehistoric
Cultures in the Neolithic Near East ........................................................... 271
Olivier Aurenche and Stefan K. Kozlowski
15 To Tame a Land: Archaeological Cultures and the Spread
of the Neolithic in Western Europe ............................................................ 289
Marc Vander Linden
16 Are ‘Cultures’ Inherited? Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the
Origins and Migrations of Austronesian-Speaking Peoples
Prior to 1000 bc .............................................................................................. 321
Peter Bellwood, Geoffrey Chambers, Malcolm Ross,
and Hsiao-chun Hung
17 What Role for Language Prehistory in Redefining Archaeological
“Culture”? A Case Study on New Horizons in the Andes .................... 355
David Beresford-Jones and Paul Heggarty
Index .......................................................................................................................... 387
Contributors
Olivier Aurenche
Université Lumière Lyon-2, Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, France
Peter Bellwood
School of Archaeology and Anthropology,
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
David Beresford-Jones
Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Leipzig, Germany
Penny Bickle
Department of Archaeology and Conservation, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Geoffrey Chambers
School of Biological Sciences, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
Hannah Fluck
Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins, University of Southampton,
Southampton, UK
Olivier P. Gosselain
Centre d’anthropologie culturelle, Université Libre de Bruxelles,
Brussels, Belgium & GAES, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Paul Heggarty
Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Leipzig, Germany
Daniela Hofmann
Centre for Lifelong Learning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Terry Hopkinson
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
vii
viii Contributors
Hsiao-chun Hung
Department of Archaeology and Natural History, Research School of Pacific
and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
Stefan K. Kozlowski
Institute of Archaeology, Uniwersytet Warszawski,
Krakowskie Przedmieście, Warszaw, Poland
Kristian Kristiansen
Department of Archaeology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Michael J. O’Brien
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA
Cameron A. Petrie
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Ryan J. Rabett
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Katharina C. Rebay-Salisbury
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Felix Riede
Department of Archaeology, Institute of Anthropology,
Archaeology and Linguistics, Aarhus University, Moesgård, Denmark
Benjamin W. Roberts
Department of Prehistory and Europe, The British Museum, London, UK
Malcolm Ross
Department of Linguistics, School of Culture, History and Language, Australian
National University, Canberra, Australia
Marc Vander Linden
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester,
Leicester, UK
Chapter 1
Investigating Archaeological Cultures:
Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission
Benjamin W. Roberts and Marc Vander Linden
Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition. Both a gift
and a trap
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003, 22)
Introduction
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 archaeo-
logical cultures is deeply flawed and, as a consequence, should no longer be applied
or even discussed.
The purpose of this volume is to re-ignite the debate concerning the analysis of
archaeological cultures. The reason is that archaeological cultures continue to be
employed by prehistorians throughout the world. They are used in order to make
sense of potentially coherent assemblages of artefacts, from the Lower Palaeolithic to
the onset of reflective literacy. This continuing practical reliance upon a theoretically
moribund concept occurs even though the majority of archaeological cultures were
B.W. Roberts (*)
Department of Prehistory and Europe, The British Museum, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
B.W. Roberts and M. Vander Linden (eds.), Investigating Archaeological Cultures: 1
Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6970-5_1,
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011