It's not culture's fault
Authors | |
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Year of publication | 2012 |
Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
MU Faculty or unit | |
Citation | |
Description | Archeological culture can be considered to be empirically limited structures within a positivistic understanding of prehistory. These are models of human life in a particular time and space, which comes out of the scientific and social mores at the time of their definition. Today, the growth of this data along with the instruments for their analysis, as well as the introduction of other scientific themes, inevitably leads to a weakening of these models. The signs, with which cultures were originally described and with which their quantity and ubiquity were studied (burial rituals, the character of settlements, artifacts, space) have often been influenced by signs from the present. The assigning of cultures was influenced by state borders and even ideologies. The pigeon-holing of assemblages/localities to one or another culture has often been done mechanically, without in-depth analysis of the period. We don't consider the term Archeological Culture problematic in and of itself. We do however have an issue with the use of this term, where instead of an abstract model, which Archeological Culture is, we create out of an Archeological Culture (the only possible), genuinely existing group. |