ABSTRACT
It is often claimed that archaeologists and anthropologists need to build a theory of material culture. This claim now seems suspect to me because it assumes that ‘material culture’ constitutes a category about which ‘a theory’ can be built. It is not at all obvious that screwdrivers, paper clips, a landscape, a tower block, flags and a Rembrandt painting have very much in common or that they have more in common with each other than they do with writing (which is also a material product but which is usually considered in the context of ‘language’). It remains to be demonstrated convincingly that all the different types of material have something in common so that a unified category can be described (for attempts to do this see Gould and Schiffer 1981; Hodder 1982; Shanks and Tilley 1987).
