Culture and Context

Culture and Context
Anthropology, and archaeology as part of it, is unified by one common thread, the concept of
culture. Everyone lives within a cultural context—middle-class Americans, Romans, and Kwakiutl
Indians of northwestern North America. Each culture has its own recognizable cultural style, which
shapes the behavior of its members, their political and judicial institutions, and their morals.
Human culture is unique because much of its content is transmitted from generation to
generation by sophisticated communication systems. Formal education, religious beliefs, and daily
social intercourse all transmit culture and allow societies to develop complex and continuing
adaptations to aid their survival. Culture is a potential guide to human behavior created through
generations of human experience. Human beings are the only animals that use culture as their primary
means of adapting to the environment. While biological evolution has protected animals like the arctic
fox from bitterly cold winters, only human beings make thick clothes in cold latitudes and construct
light thatched shelters in the Tropics.
Culture is an adaptive system, an interface between ourselves, the environment, and other
human societies. Throughout the long millennia of prehistory, human culture became more elaborate,
for it is our only means of adaptation and we are always adjusting to environmental, technological, and
societal change.
The great Victorian anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor described culture as “that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society.” Prehistoric archaeologists prefer to define culture as the
primary nonbiological means by which people adapt to their environment. They consider it as
representing the cumulative intellectual resources of human societies, passed down by the spoken word
and by example.
Human cultures are made up of many different parts, such as language, technology, religious
beliefs, ways of obtaining food, and so on. These elements interact with one another to form complex
and ever-changing cultural systems, systems that adjust to long and short-term environmental change.
Archaeologists work with the tangible remains of ancient cultural systems, typically such
durable artifacts as stone tools or clay pot fragments. Such finds are a patterned reflection of the culture
that created them. Archaeologists spend much time studying the linkages between past cultures and
their archaeological remains. They do so within precise contexts of time and space.
Time and Space
Archaeologists date the past and study the ever-changing distributions of ancient cultures across the
world by studying the context of archaeological finds, whether sites, food remains, or artifacts, in time
and space. This is the study of culture history, the description of human cultures as they extend back
thousands of years.
1. Time
Human prehistory has a time scale of more than 2.5 million years and a vast landscape
of archaeological sites that were occupied for long and short periods of time. Some, like the Aztec
capital, Tenochtitlán, in the Valley of Mexico, were occupied for a few centuries. Others, like
Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, were visited repeatedly over hundreds of thousands of years. The
chronology of prehistory is made up from thousands of careful excavations and many types of
dating tests. These have created hundreds of local sequences of prehistoric cultures and
archaeological sites throughout the world.
Historical records provide a chronology for about 5,000 years of human history in
Egypt and Mesopotamia, less time in other regions. For earlier times, archaeologists rely on both
relative and absolute dating methods to develop chronological sequences.
Relative dating is based on a fundamental principle of stratigraphic geology, the Law
of Superposition, which states that underlying levels are earlier than those that cover them. Thus
any object found in a lower level is from an earlier time than any from upper layers. Manufactured
artifacts are the fundamental data that archaeologists use to study human behavior. These artifacts
have changed in radical ways with passing time. One has only to look at the simple stone choppers
and flakes made by the first humans and compare them with the latest luxury automobile to get the
point. By combining the study of changes in artifact forms with observations of their contexts in
stratified layers in archaeological sites, the prehistorian can develop relative chronologies for
artifacts, sites, and cultures in any part of the world.
The story of prehistory has unfolded against a backdrop of massive world climatic
change 5 during the Great Ice Age (See Prehistory and the Great Ice Age). Sometimes, when human
artifacts come to light in geological strata dating to the Ice Age, one can place them in a much
broader geological context. But in such cases, as with relative chronologies from other
archaeological sites, determining the actual date of these sites and artifacts in years is a matter of
guesswork, or of applying absolute dating methods.
Absolute chronology is the process of dating in calendar years. A whole battery of
chronological methods have been developed to date human prehistory, some of them frankly
experimental, others well established and widely used. The following are the best known ones.
Historical documents can sometimes be used to date events, such as the death of an
ancient Egyptian pharaoh or the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1519–21 C.E. Clay tablet records
in Mesopotamia and ancient Egyptian papyri provide dates going back to about 3000 B.C.E. The
early Near Eastern civilizations traded many of their wares, such as pottery or coins with precise
dates, over long distances. These objects can be used to date sites in, say, temperate Europe, far
from literate civilization at the time.

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Culture and Context

light thatched shelters in the Tropics.

Time and Space

archaeological sites throughout the world.

relative and absolute dating methods to develop chronological sequences.

Relative dating is based on a fundamental principle of stratigraphic geology, the Law

artifacts, sites, and cultures in any part of the world.

guesswork, or of applying absolute dating methods.

Absolute chronology is the process of dating in calendar years. A whole battery of

from literate civilization at the time.

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