Please note that this site is no longer being updated. For an up-to-date version of this page, please visit Bad Archaeology.
The twentieth century
In the early twentieth century, there were important developments in the way archaeological data were used to understand the past. Until 1900, the emphasis had been on collecting data to establish local sequences, but there was little appreciation of how they might be related to each other. One of the main obstacles to linking these sequences was the lack of any sort of chronology beyond the relative scheme of the ‘Three Age’ system.
Vere Gordon Childe,
1892-1957
One of the first people to tackle this problem was Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957), an Australian prehistorian who had settled in the UK. He was heavily influenced by the anthropological theories of Franz Boas (1848-1942) and attempted to construct historical sequences of artefact types and to recognise design links. Childe was the first to attempt a synthesis of the data from prehistoric Europe, a huge feat and one that long dominated our undertsanding of the continent’s early development. One of his greatest contributions to the development of archaeology was his popularising of the concept of the ‘archaeological culture’, a recurring assemblge of artefact, settlement and burial types that so-called “Culture Historians” believed were the material expressions of ethnic groups. This theorisation of material culture made it valuable to the nationalist archaeologies that were prevalent in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Archaeology was put to deliberately political use in encouraging European populations to identify with the monuments of their supposed ancestors-Gauls in France, Romans in Italy, Germans in Germany and so on-while in Africa and the Americas, monuments such as Great Zimbabwe were interpreted as the monuments of earlier European (or Semitic) explorers and colonisers.
Childe framed the beginnings of agriculture and urbanisation in terms of ‘revolutions’, drewing on the Marxist view of social, economic and technological development. He was convinced that the well-known civilisations of the Middle East were the source of innovations, which were spread into Europe by a process of diffusion, either of ideas or of people. As a result, he traced the supposed migrations of cultures across Europe, employing explicitly diffusionist models. By relating the cultures he defined to each other and back to the supposed origins of various traits, he attempted to provide an absolute chronology for European prehistory.
The application of Culture History by Gordon Childe helped to move archaeological reasoning away from purely historical or anthropological modes of explanation, which had tended to be particularistic and illustrative or generalising and deterministic. Archaeological data were seen as something that existed in their own right and deserved to be analysed in a special and specifically archaeological way. More importantly, the collection of this data enabled the basic sequences of material culture through time to be worked out in considerable detail, even if the mechanisms for comparing contemporary sets of material culture through space were not yet available, leading to some spectacularly wrong conclusions about chronology and relationships between different areas.
A contemporary of Childe’s, Alfred Vincent Kidder (1885-1963), was working on archaeological sequences in North America. He could begin with conteporary (or near-contemporary) styles of pottery produced by Native Americans and, by using archaeological assemblages, trace their origins further back in time. In this way, he believed, it was possible to trace the history of various groups back into times before European settlers arrived in North America and began to document the histories of the indigenous peoples. He also stressed the importance of using specialist scholars in a multidisciplinary approach to archaeological projects.
The poverty of using migration and cultural diffusion as an explanation was evident by 1960. In fact, it was not even necessary to demolish it systematically as the newly developing technique of radiocarbon dating made many of the supposed links impossible: cultures that were supposed to be the product of outside influence turned out to be older than their putative parent cultures. Even so, a series of devastating critiques, mostly confined to specialist archaeological journals, destroyed the simplistic use of migrations and invasions to explain cultural change. Archaeologists came to understand that change is something that is part of all human cultures. People are inquisitive, innovative and adaptive. Things change because human beings change: there is rarely any need to invoke outside interference (or the migration of populations) to explain cultural change. Unfortunately, many of the new ideas that developed in the 1960s and 1970s were never popularised in the way that older ideas had been and cultural change - especially in the prehistoric past - is still seen by many as being brought about by the movements of entire peoples.