ABSTRACT
Historical research in the field of prehistory in the region known as Cantabrian Spain has not exactly been open to the theoretical and methodological trends associated with social archaeology that have developed since the 1980s, and much less to the approaches connected with neo-Marxist critical theories. In contrast, regional archaeology has continued to follow metatheoretical assumptions and methodological principles with no great conceptual determination. The conventional periodization based on technotypology has been followed acritically, which has led to the maintenance (explicit or, more often, implicit and nearly always problematic) of a sequence of chronocultural entities that are attributed packets of traits without going too deeply into processual aspects, and much less social ones (Ontañón 2003a, 2006). Even today it can be said that the dominant disciplinary trend in prehistoric research in the region at the start of the new millennium is the one that thirty years ago Vicent (1982) called “modified positivism” or “pragmatic reformism,” a methodological aggiornamento of the most traditional positivist research.
