Culture-historical archaeology
Webster remarked that the defining feature of culture-historical archaeology was its "statements which reveal common notions about the nature of ancient cultures; about their qualities; about how they related to the material record; and thus about how archaeologists might effectively study them.
The Industrial Revolution had spread across many nations, leading to the creation of large urban centres, most of which were filled with poverty stricken proletarian workers.
Whilst some intellectuals had championed the Industrial Revolution as a progressive step forward, there were many who had seen it as a negative turn of events, disrupting the established fabric of society.
This latter view was taken up by the Romanticist movement, which was largely made up of artists and writers, who popularised the idea of an idyllic ancient agrarian society.
In the late 19th century, anthropologists like Franz Boas and Friedrich Ratzel were promoting the idea that cultures represented geographically distinct entities, each with their own characteristics that had developed largely through the chance accumulation of different traits.
Similar ideas were also coming from Germany's neighbour, Austria, at around this time, namely from two anthropologist Roman Catholic priests, Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt, as well as by the archaeologist Oswald Menghin.
[1][7] Bruce Trigger also argued that the development of culture-historical archaeology was in part due to the rising tide of nationalism and racism in Europe, which emphasised ethnicity as the main factor shaping history.
Such nationalistic sentiment began to be adopted within academic disciplines by intellectuals who wished to emphasise solidarity within their own nations – in the face of social unrest caused by industrialization – by blaming neighbouring states.
[3] Having been inspired and influenced by European nationalism, in turn, culture-historical archaeology would be utilised in support of nationalist political causes.
In many cases, nationalists used culture-historical archaeological interpretations to highlight and celebrate the prehistoric and ancient past of their ancestors, and prove an ethnic and cultural link to them.
As such, many members of various European nations placed an emphasis on archaeologically proving a connection with a particular historical ethnicity, for instance the French often maintained that they were the ethnic and cultural descendants of the ancient Gauls, whilst the English did the same with the Anglo-Saxons and the Welsh and Irish with the Celts, and archaeologists in these countries were encouraged to interpret the archaeological evidence to fit these conclusions.
[10] In 1869, the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistoric Archaeology (Urgeschichte) had been founded, an organisation that was dominated by the figure of Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), a pathologist and leftist politician.
A keen linguist, Childe was able to master a number of European languages, including German, and was well acquainted with the works on archaeological cultures written by Kossina.
In The Danube in Prehistory, Childe introduced the concept of an archaeological culture (which up until then had been largely restrained purely to German academics), to his British counterparts.
[21] Culture history uses inductive reasoning unlike its main rival, processual archaeology which stresses the importance of the hypothetico-deduction method.
