 In 1935, he suggested that culture worked as a "living functioning organism", emphasising the adaptive potential of material culture; in this he was influenced by anthropological functionalism. However, by the late 1940s he came to question the utility of "culture" as an archaeological concept, and therefore the validity of the culture-historical approach. McNairn suggested that this was because the term had become popular across the social sciences in reference to all learned modes of behaviour, and not just material culture as Childe had first used it. He accepted that archaeologists defined "cultures" based on a subjective selection of material criteria; this view later came to be widely adopted by archaeologists like Colin Renfrew.
