On Cultures
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-05-11

The role of cultures in archaeological narratives has importance both in the ways in which we think about the material remains of the past, and the ways in which we approach these materials. This paper will examine how archaeologists think about things with regard to two axes – the temporal and the spatial. Excepting these fundamental axes, everything else, more or less, is Culture. This paper will examine the ‘more or less’ aspects of culture with regard to time and space – how structuring material culture provides an overarching intellectual approach to past societies, while at the same time being the subject or sequence of investigation. Drawing on the work of Stukely, Childe, Clarke and Sherratt as well as more recent writers, this paper will take a long view. As part of this I will consider how the ordering of archaeological things in time, space and culture influences archaeological narratives, and how differences in emphasis on time, space and culture recur between shifts in emphasis from the nature of things, to the nature of archaeological knowledge 

Seren Griffiths (University of Central Lancashire)