rather than simply a reflection of ideational norms. Hence any one-to-one link between cultural variation and past peoples (ethnic groups, tribes, races) was broken. Cultural variation could arise from numerous social processes, often linked to functional and adaptive requirements. The identification of cultures became regarded as a preliminary stage in archaeological research—the necessary classification of archaeological “facts” prior to interpretation. However, descriptive historical reconstructions of past cultures and peoples were no longer considered to be the primary objective of archaeological interpretation.

There are a number of exceptions to this general picture, all of which are rooted in a reconceptualization of ethnicity as an aspect of social organization, rather than a passive reflection of normative culture. Work in social anthropology—for instance, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (F. Barth, ed. [1969]) and Urban Ethnicity (A. Cohen, ed. [1974])—emphasized that the recognition and expression of group identity or ethnicity are social processes usually related to economic and political relationships between groups. Ethnic identity, it was argued, involves the active maintenance of cultural boundaries in the process of social interaction, rather than a passive reflection of cultural norms. Ethnicity thus becomes an aspect of social process and yet another component of the social system (alongside subsistence, economics, politics, religion, and so on) that requires processual analysis. Recent overviews of anthropological approaches to ethnicity are provided by Thomas H. Eriksen in Ethnicity and Nationalism (1993) and by Banks’s Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (1996).

Following these developments, two main areas of research can be identified in the archaeological literature of the 1970s and 1980s. The first comprised studies concerned with the relationship between material culture and ethnic symbolism. For instance, on the basis of ethno-archaeological research in Baringo, Kenya, I. Hodder (Symbols in Action [1982]) argued that there is rarely a one-to-one correlation between cultural similarities or differences and ethnic groups. He demonstrated that the kinds of material culture involved in ethnic symbolism can vary between different groups and that the expression of ethnic boundaries may involve a limited range of material culture, even as other material forms and styles may be shared across group boundaries. Others studies include R. Haaland’s research on Sudanese Nubia (Norwegian Archaeological Review 10, 1977), A. Praetzellis and colleagues’ examination of Chinese-American identity (in A. Saski, ed., Living in Cities [1987]), and R. Larick’s analysis of Loikop Sanbura spears (World Archaeology 18, 1986).

The second main area of research concerned the role of ethnicity in the structuring of economic and political relationships. Thus, for instance, Hodder also showed how the maintenance of ethnic boundaries in the Baringo District related to modes of subsistence and control over resources. Drawing on this ethno-archaeological research, he and others attempted to examine similar processes in late–Iron Age Britain (see Blackmore et al. in B.C. Burnham and J. Kingsbury, eds., Space, Hierarchy and Society [1979]). A rather different example is provided by E.M. Brumfiel’s analysis of ethnicity in the aztec state (in E.M. Brumfiel and J.W. Fox, eds., Factional Competition and Political Development in the New World [1994]). State representations of identity, Brumfiel argues, were fashioned to suit the needs of particular political factions. The Aztecs sought to override particularistic ethnic identities within regional elites, but at the same time they promoted derogatory ethnic stereotypes that served to reinforce the superiority of the civil state culture.

These studies clearly situated ethnicity as an active social process, rather than a passive reflection of shared cultural norms. Nevertheless, they perpetuated the idea of ethnic groups as discrete, coherent wholes. Since 1990, however, archaeologists have started to challenge the very existence of ethnic groups in the form of bounded, monolithic, territorially based entities. Instead, it is argued that the construction of ethnicity (and cultural identity in general) is a situational and dynamic process that can take diverse forms in different contexts of social interaction. The material world both informs such processes of identity construction and is used in