Theory – Culture

Archaeologists dig to understand how people in the past lived, to discover unknown history, and to clarify known history.  Part of this process is the recovery of objects, which helps the archaeologist to determine and define the culture of the ancients.  But, therein lies the problem.  Can objects really be expected to be able to define a people?

Culture is usually defined as the repeatable beliefs and practices of a group of people.  Thus, culture is restricted to space and time (but time must be long enough to be repeated).  The question is if the objects that are produced by a culture can be indicative of that culture.  In other words, does a bowl tell us anything about the beliefs and practices of the people who make it.  In at least some way, however small, it does.  And thus, objects are often referred to as “material culture”. 

In reality, there is little else the archaeologist can study to get at culture.  However, obviously the complete culture of a people can never be fully realized by the study of material culture simply because people cannot be defined by the objects they make and use.  Sure, from these objects we can infer many things but to believe anything else is probably over simplification and generalization.

What makes it even worse is if the object was acquired by an antiquarian and not by an archaeologist.  An object without context (meaning without space or time) is almost useless to achieve a knowledge of a people.  This is why the enemy of the archaeologist is the antiquarian (treasure hunter, tomb raider, random person with a metal detector, local antiquity dealer, etc).  Without knowing where an object came from there is no way to learn about the people who made and used it.  Without knowing when an object was made and used, it is floating in the void of history and is only good for its aesthetic value.

Thanks to Indiana Jones (who I think if really cool) and Lara Croft Tomb Raider (who I also like) the general public often mistakes antiquarians with archaeologists.  The romantic notion of solving dangerous temple puzzles and avoiding booby-traps, is far from what usually happens.  Archaeology is much more like Crime Scene Investigation with the crime being the passing of time and sometimes something more exciting like the invasion of a foreign army.

The puzzle of culture is actually got at through comparative studies.  An archaeologist digs at a given site in a region.  The objects that are found are then classified into types.  These types, as a group from this site, form an assemblage.  The  ssemblage of this site combined with assemblages from other sites, joined together, help the archaeologist to define the culture of a region.

Because this has been the system of study there is a lot of criticism of the classification of type.  Type is basically a tool that looks at the changes in the physical features of an object over time.  This in and of itself is fine.  What is a bit  ontroversial is the link this has to culture.

It is controversial because archaeologists now know that there are many reasons why this change might take place that would have nothing to do with the development of culture.  Objects change form (and thus type) through migration (people moving from one place to another), diffusion (people adopting nearby ideas), invasion (people forcing a new culture upon another), revolution (people inventing a new culture), among other ways.

Perhaps the answer is that the study of objects should only loosely be used to get at the culture of a people and instead, maybe objects should just be studied as what they are – useful items and no longer be used to define a people.