ABSTRACT
When prehistoric archaeology began as a discipline in Europe in the late 19th century, it was in a climate of nationalism. The nation states that were emerging, and agitating to emerge, from the decaying empires and fragmented principalities and dukedoms of Central Europe were looking for a charter to justify their existence and their romantic intellectuals had sought this in the past. It became apparent to them that the increasing quantities of what was now recognized as archaeological material that were being dug up as a result of expanding industrialization could potentially be used to trace a history of peoples into the remote past, if a relationship could be established between records of such peoples in ancient sources and sets
of material remains whose origins could then be traced still further back into the preliterate past. It was soon clear that this involved two main descriptive tasks: identifying patterns of similarity and difference in space and placing them in time. This was archaeology as cultural history: identifying prehistoric cultures and putting them in order. It implied tracing histories of social information transmission and identifying breaks in transmission, spatial and chronological. The factors that were believed to produce the continuities and discontinuities in traditions were migration and diffusion. A new set of cultural material appearing in an area would be the result of a new migrating people. The spatial boundaries of the material would represent the territory occupied by that people, and when that type of archaeological material was in its turn replaced by something new this indicated the arrival of new people, with different traditions. Less radical changes, especially if they were apparently useful, such as the introduction of bronze metallurgy, could be explained by diffusion, the transmission of new information across existing populations.
