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Culture-historical archaeology
Theoretical paradigm in archaeology / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Culture-historical archaeology is an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.
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It originated in the late nineteenth century as cultural evolutionism began to fall out of favor with many antiquarians and archaeologists. It was gradually superseded in the mid-twentieth century by processual archaeology. Cultural-historical archaeology had in many cases been influenced by a nationalist political agenda, being utilised to prove a direct cultural and/or ethnic link from prehistoric and ancient peoples to modern nation-states, something that has in many respects been disproved by later research and archaeological evidence.
First developing in Germany among those archaeologists surrounding Rudolf Virchow, culture-historical ideas would later be popularised by Gustaf Kossinna. Culture-historical thought would be introduced to British archaeology by the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe in the late 1920s. In the United Kingdom and United States, culture-history came to be supplanted as the dominant theoretical paradigm in archaeology during the 1960s, with the rise of processual archaeology. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the world, culture-historical ideas continue to dominate.