ABSTRACT
Throughout its history, archaeology has concerned itself with the cultural lives of past peoples. Moreover, throughout the twentieth century, nationalist and ethnocentric interpretations of the past have been built upon the understanding that there was some direct relationship between assemblages of material culture preserved in the present and human groups which existed in the past (Champion and Diaz-Andreu 1995; Graves-Brown et al. 1995). However, precisely what archaeologists have considered themselves to be investigating has differed radically from one time to another. The word ‘culture’ has come to mean quite different things to different archaeologists, and in part this has been a consequence of the manifold interconnections between archaeology and other disciplines. A series of debates within those disciplines has penetrated into archaeological thought, which in turn has generated quite different traditions of inquiry of its own.
