Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (189 page)

See
FORMATION PROCESSES
.

 
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Values or modes of behaviour shared by all human cultures.

 
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Probably one of the most used terms in contemporary archaeology, and broadly derived from anthropology and sociology. The anthropologist E. B. Tylor set the scene in the late 19th century by defining culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’. Thus in a general sense culture is a commonly preferred learned form of behaviour which has been adopted by a given society and which includes distinctive and complicated systems of technology, social organization, thought, cosmology, and ideology. Culture is something that articulates a human society with its environment and, for Leslie White , writing in the late 1950s, could be seen in adaptive functional terms as ‘an extrasomatic, temporal continuum of things and events dependent upon symbolling....A mechanism whose function is to make life secure and continuous for groups and individuals of the human species’.
In the purely archaeological sense, the idea of a culture was firmly established in the late 1920s by Gordon Childe whose Marxist perspectives shine through in his proposition that ‘we find certain types of remains—pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms—constantly recurring together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall term a “cultural group” or just a “culture”. We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today we would call a “people”.’ Thus, for archaeologists, a culture is usually taken to be a constantly recurring assemblage of artefacts which are assumed to be representative of a particular set of activities carried out at a particular time and place. As such, archaeological cultures are defined by archaeologists rather than the original participants.

 
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An approach to archaeological data that orders structures and artefacts into a basic sequence of events in time and space, usually as a generalized description of human achievement under broad period-based headings. Widely regarded as a rather traditional approach to archaeological investigation, the culture history view has been criticized by
PROCESSUAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS
and
POST-PROCESSUAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS
for the fact that explanations in terms of migration or invasion are not explanations or understandings at all but merely descriptions of events. Nonetheless, the development of a robust culture history remains the object of some archaeological work, especially the geographical and chronological mapping of cultures and cultural influences.

 
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The study of culture.

 
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See
DOVECOT
.

 
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