like an ambitious attempt at paleoethnology (Sackett 2000). However, it was not a direction that was followed for very long, and French archaeologist gabriel de mortillet reformulated Lartet’s scheme, substituting archaeological names for the paleontological descriptions.

The hippopotamus age became the Chellean, later renamed the Abbevillian. Much of the great bear and mammoth age was classified as Mousterian, named after the site of le moustier in central France. De Mortillet identified the mammoth period with the site of Aurignac and called it Aurignacian. The reindeer age was divided into two, the earliest ultimately named the Solutrian after the site of solutré in eastern France, and the later named after la madeleine in central France (Daniel 1975, 103). However, even though site names had replaced the names of animals as labels, the scheme still owed much to paleontology. Each stage was thought of as an epoch, a vaguely defined temporal phase, rather than as an artifact complex (Sackett 1991). It was easy, therefore, to relate a unilinear succession of technological change to a unilinear theory of human evolution (Trigger 1989, 95–97).

The idea that all human groups passed through the same stages of cultural development, albeit not at the same time nor at the same rate, provided the rationale for using more-primitive living human groups to model the lifestyles of prehistoric groups with similar technologies. This analogy also provided an answer to the problem of explaining progress in terms of economic, social, and political factors. Huxley (1863) suggested that the Australian Aborigines could be used to flesh out reconstructions of the Neanderthals and their Middle Paleolithic tool kits (Trigger 1989, 113) while Lubbock (1865) applied descriptions of the Eskimo lifestyle to paint a picture of long-extinct Upper Paleolithic communities (Trigger 1989, 115).

By the 1880s, the Enlightenment ideal of universal human progress had been replaced by the idea that differences between cultural groups had deep-seated biological origins. As nationalism was encouraged, so was the search for the biological roots of those national characteristics, and racial factors replaced environmental ones as explanations for the different historical trajectories of different cultural groups (Trigger 1989, 111). Darwinian evolution seemed to equate with these ideas and helped to lay the foundations for a form of cultural evolutionism in which natural selection was invoked to explain both the differences between cultures and the biological capacity for culture. Thus, the sequence of stone artifact technologies described by Paleolithic archaeologists seemingly provided the tangible evidence needed to document the evolution of modern human societies (Sackett 1991).

Artifacts as Cultural Markers

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a growing European nationalism fostered an interest in the history and archaeology of particular ethnic groups and focused attention on the archaeology of more recent time periods. By now, archaeologists had documented far more variation in material culture assemblages than could be accommodated comfortably within a unilinear evolutionary framework. In seeking to explain this variation, a resemblance was noted between the patterning of archaeological assemblages and differences in the material cultures of living peoples, with the diffusion of ideas contributing to the creation of distinct culture areas (Robertshaw 1990; Sackett 1981; Trigger 1989, 122).

Those observations laid the foundations for an explanatory model that was to dominate Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age archaeological research for much of the twentieth century. The model’s development can be traced through the work of oscar montelius on typology and seriation (Trigger 1989, 158), gustaf kossinna on material remains used to track the history of ethnic groups (Trigger 1989, 163), and the late-nineteenth-century German ethnologists who established the association between material remains and ethnic groups, but it is perhaps best exemplified by the work of English archaeologist vere gordon childe (Childe 1925).

Childe sought to identify recurring sets of material remains whose spatial and temporal boundaries could be used to define the boundaries between prehistoric cultures. Those prehistoric cultures were considered analogous to