Culture-historical archaeology is an archaeological theory that emphasises defining historical societies into distinct ethnic and cultural groupings according to their material culture.
Items from the Neolithic "Beaker culture"; the idea of defining distinct "cultures" according to their material culture was at the core of culture-historical archaeology.
The rise of European nationalism in the 19th century played a key role in the development of culture-historical archaeology.
Rudolf Virchow NLM3
Gustaf Kossinna by Bruno Dietrich Sassnick
Processual archaeology
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Processual archaeology is a form of archaeological theory. It had its beginnings in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archaeology, in which the pai
Culture-historical archaeology
…cultural evolutionism began to fall out of favor with many antiquarians and archaeologists. It was gradually superseded in the mid-twentieth century by processual archaeology. Cultural-historical archaeology had in many cases been influenced by a nationalist political agenda, being utilised to prove a direct cultural and/or…
Processual archaeology originated in American archaeology, where analysing historical change over time had proved difficult with existing technology