why the concept was so all-pervasive and persistent until the 1920s and 1930s. However, race politics also contributed to the demise of race within the social sciences because those in contemporary institutions abhorred the notion of race and the practices associated with it. By the 1930s a critique of the concept of race was emerging in archaeology, just as it was in social and cultural anthropology, as expressed in J.S. Huxley and A.C. Haddon’s We Europeans: A Survey of Racial Problems (1935). This critique consisted less of an attack on the concept of race per se than of a dismantling of the correlation of cultural and physical groupings and a questioning of the appropriateness of the concept of race for archaeological analysis. For instance, in “Races, Peoples and Cultures in Prehistoric Europe” (History 18, 1933), Childe argued that any confusion between cultural-linguistic and physiological similarity should be studiously avoided, as culture is a “social heritage” that has no direct link to the physical traits acquired through heredity. Writing in the early 1930s, Childe was concerned with the political implications of archaeological research, most notably the political use of Kossinna’s claims about the superiority and the purity of the Nordic Aryan race. This concern to distinguish race from cultural forms of differentiation was heightened following World War II and the ensuing outrage over the political appropriation of the past under the Third Reich. Racial-ethnic labels, such as the “Germani,” the “Aryans,” and the “Indo-Europeans,” were avoided by many due to their political associations. Following the rejection of the grand evolutionary schemes of the late nineteenth century, the empiricist trend that emerged was consolidated, at least in Europe. However, the emphasis now was on the description of empirical evidence in terms of artifact “types” and “archaeological cultures,” rather than on past peoples.

By the mid-twentieth century the definition of culture areas had become the principal means by which prehistory was delineated in space and time, producing a mosaic of discrete peoples and cultures. But despite the uncoupling of race and culture, the culture concept carried over many associated ideas about the nature of human groups, in particular their holistic, bounded, and homogeneous character. The normative theories of culture that were employed were based on the idea that within a given group, cultural practices and beliefs tended to conform to prescriptive ideational norms or rules of behavior. Further, these norms were said to be maintained by regular interaction within the group and the transmission of shared cultural norms to subsequent generations through the process of socialization. A culture was therefore regarded as the product of a particular society or ethnic group, and at the same time it was assumed to provide the distinguishing characteristics of that group. Within an archaeological framework such ideas led to the assumption of a fixed and one-to-one relationship between material types and particular past peoples, even if they were no longer referred to as races. Thus, as Ulrich Veit argued in “Ethnic Concepts in German Prehistory” (in Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity, S.J. Shennan, ed. [1989]), the term archaeological culture became merely a quasi-ideology-free substitute for the terms race and ethnic group. Peoples of the past still lurked behind the apparently neutral archaeological cultures. Useful summaries of the place of culture-history in the archaeological traditions of various European countries can be found in contributions to Archaeological Theory in Europe (I. Hodder, ed. [1991]). For a discussion of developments in other regions of the world see the contributions to Theory in Archaeology: A World Perspective (P. J. Ucko, ed. [1995]).

Recent Approaches and Debates

During the 1960s and 1970s a concerted shift occurred in archaeological theory and method with the emergence of the “New Archaeology” (later more widely referred to as “processual archaeology”). The normative concept of culture that had dominated traditional archaeology was overturned within New Archaeology. It was argued that culture constitutes an integrated system, made up of differently functioning subsystems such as subsistence, exchange, politics, ideology, and religion. Consequently, it was argued, archaeological remains must be regarded as the product of a variety of past processes,