Culture History - Essay Example

Culture History The concept of culture history refers to the need of scientists to look at the cultural, social and political elements of a given society at a given time period in order to understand what that society was like and how the people might have lived their lives. However, in the case of archaeologists, the available evidence has been reduced to a collection of pieces and little or no written record. “The term culture is used in a specific way in archaeology. It refers to the appearance in the archaeological record of … as Childe put it, ‘certain types of remains – pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites, house forms – constantly recurring together’. These … are commonly assumed to represent distinct social groups in the past – tribes, peoples, even races. But material assemblages … do not necessarily correspond to past social groups” (Faulkner, 37). There are several who question the importance of this concept in the field of archaeology because of the somewhat invented view it offers of pre-historic peoples, but it is a very valuable tool as a means of opening up possible investigations into the collections of materials found. One of the archaeologists most associated with the use of this concept is Vere Gordan Childe. In his early investigations, Childe used this concept to link a number of artifacts together within specific social groups, a practice that is still used today. Childe took this one step further by comparing the finds from numerous sites across Europe, finally coming to a conclusion that language and specific ethnic characteristics explain cultural development. However, these observations were soon used as a means of justifying Nazi oppression and Childe revised his theory. Instead, he suggested that cultural development occurred as a result of tribal interactions. Childe’s argument is essentially that cultures resist change, causing them to experience episodes of complete stagnation. When they are exposed to external shocks, they are forced to innovate and advance. The degree to which they were able to do this depended on the number and severity of their external or internal contradictions. External contradictions would include not enough resources to fully develop new technologies and internal contradictions would include a powerful priesthood resistant to change. Because development occurs as a process influenced by all these factors, each society develops in its own unique way – perhaps getting advanced ideas from one culture and then able to leap ahead because of decreased levels of contradictions. By using the concept of culture history, Childe was able to open up a new means of approaching archaeology that is not complete, but offers a starting point for investigations to follow. Because it is only through the material remains discovered that some peoples and cultures are now known to have existed, we can only understand these societies by comparing what has been left behind with other cultures that we have more knowledge about. This may or may not have any real meaning to the original culture (Johnson, 2007). For this reason, some have argued against the use of culture history as a means of understanding finds. “Historians who studied ancient Greece, Rome or the Bible could set out to locate physical traces on the ground of events and civilizations described in literature; this possibility was simply not available to other historians, natural scientists or collectors who tried to make sense of artifacts or graves surviving from times before the earliest surviving written records in other areas, for example pre-Roman Britain” (Greene, 5). As Trigger (1989) explains, there is no such thing as objective knowledge and therefore no such thing as an absolute truth. We can interpret the findings in many different ways, all of which may contain some truth relating to the original society, but perhaps none of which offers any accuracy. Yet culture history can provide some accuracy as it is constrained by the artifacts found and the necessities common to all human life. In considering the idea of culture history, it must be acknowledged that nothing is certain regarding our interpretations, but it is also a very real part of our present existence. While we do not have the first-hand accounts of the 15th century diarist, we do have the ability to compare to human needs as they are expressed today. “The only way in which we can understand their meaning [the artifacts] – if you will, the way in which we can state the archaeological record in words – is by knowing something about how these material things came into being, about how they have been modified, and about how they acquired the characteristics we see today. That understanding is dependent upon a large body of knowledge which links human activities to the consequences of those activities that may be apparent in material things” (Binford, 19). In the end, we learn more about ourselves because of archaeological study into cultural history. Works Cited Binford Lewis. (1983). In Pursuit of the Past. London: Thames and Hudson. Faulkner Neil. (2009). “Childe fifty years on.” Current Archaeology. Greene, Kevin. (2002). Archaeology: An Introduction. (Fourth Edition). Johnson, Matthew. (2007). Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. Oxford:Blackwell. Trigger B. (1989). A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge:CUP Read More