From culture history to cultural niche construction

What is it about?

Archaeologists need to upgrade or revise the frameworks within which we form our understanding of the prehistoric past. Here, I take terms like Neolithic, Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), that were formed as extensions into the southern Levant of Gordon Childe's mid-20th-century culture-history methodology, and show that they are now outdated and unhelpful. Instead of spending time arguing about how to make the archaeological facts fit into an old-style culture history, we should be trying to understand the complex cultural processes that were at work. I argue that we need a bottom-up, social network-based mode of investigating and discussing the different levels of socio-cultural networking in which people were engaged, the highest level of which was what we have mistakenly called the archaeological culture.

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Why is it important?

Instead of mapping the prehistoric past in terms of "cultures" that we imagine occupy blocks of time and blocks of space on the map, we should be focusing on the complex dynamic processes that changed Palaeolithic mobile foraging groups into large communities living together in permanent settlements.