ABSTRACT
In the 1960s the liberation of archaeology from the fetters of culture history was proclaimed under the banner of a ‘New Archaeology’. Today we can perceive an opposite trend. History has a future once more. It is no longer the pursuit of cultural universals that is at stake. It is the variety and specificity of cultural developments on which people’s efforts are focused. In the context of systems theoretical approaches the term ‘culture’ was at times reduced to the level of an extrasomatic means of adaptation to the natural environment. However, now there is a renewed interest in ‘cultures’ in the plural and not merely ‘culture’ in general. One result of this development is that ‘cultural identity’ is increasingly becoming a key term for the self-definition of a ‘post-processual’ archaeology. Questions about problems such as ethnicity and multiculturalism, which people long thought they could avoid by regarding them as unimportant, or even unscientific (for example, Hagen 1980, p. 8) are again open to archaeological debate.
