Never an easy tension. Montelius's work focused on classification of Bronze. Use, shape, decoration, style, function, form to make groupings. or types across Europe for the Bronze Age. Ever building on small fragments of data. Too often objects come to stand for people, groups, and take on anthropomorphic qualities.
Care is needed.
One way to over come this is multiple classifications. An important example with stone tools, and their inferences. Lithic artifacts are what opened up the antiquity debate with tools found in quarries. A Paleolithic study of Mousterian tools by Francois Bordes. In France there were many excavations form deeply stratified sites, lots of artifacts.