ABSTRACT
Modern archaeology possesses an hierarchical model expressing the relationships between its basic operational entities. This model, which was explicitly put forward by Clarke (1968), includes as its basic unit the ‘attribute’, seen as a logically irreducible character acting as an independent variable within an artefact system. Entities such as ‘artefact’, ‘type’ and ‘assemblage’ are placed at higher levels of the model, and higher than all of these is the ‘culture’, which is seen as a ‘polythetic set of specific and comprehensive artefact-type categories which consistently recur together in assemblages within a limited geographical area’ (Clarke 1968, p. 232). This hierarchical model is widely accepted and with various modifications is used by numerous archaeologists in different countries.
