ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the discipline of archaeology should replace its traditional concept of culture with one that focuses on the contingency and openness of cultural and historical change. Archaeology must take an explicitly transcultural perspective – one that transcends the notion of cultures as bounded units of investigation and analyses the results of processes of transculturation during which new knowledge, practices and material forms are generated through encounters and contacts. Archaeology has a long tradition of defining cultures as coexisting bounded entities that are each characterized by a recurrent combination of distinctive features of moveable material culture. The use of the terms Minoan and Mycenaean culture has led to a situation in which a diachronic and synchronic cultural homogeneity within regions and sites of the respective ‘cultural block’ is presupposed without examining the validity of this assumption.
