ABSTRACT
The question of the cultural identity of prehistoric sher-gatherer-hunter communities is often assumed to transcend time and space. The grand narrative of unity between contemporary hunter-gatherers reaching from Australia and Africa across Eurasia and to the Bering Straits is typically applied to the interpretation of prehistoric sher-gatherer-hunters of northern Europe. Such a narrative crosses between processual and post-processual archaeology, two opposing theoretical perspectives in archaeological discourse, which are nevertheless united in their common denial of the specic cultural identity and historical integrity of prehistoric shergatherer-hunter communities. One of the main goals of processual archaeology was to infer the behaviour of past cultures by looking at the patterns within archaeological remains. Cross-cultural analogies were taken into account by emphasising that particular patterns reect particular behaviours which can be traced all over the world (Mithen 1990). It was understood that human societies follow a trajectory of development which is universal, whichever part of the world they occupy or the date of any particular community, society or group we look at. The critique of this understanding of the past and present, which came to be known as postprocessualism, emphasised the need to look at material culture and its context in terms of independent historical development (Hodder et al. 1995; Renfrew and Bahn 2000). In archaeological practice, however, it has proved difcult to sustain this position. I argue that particular uses of analogies within post-processual interpretations rely on the same evolutionary framework as processual archaeology. To demonstrate this I present two examples of the use of ethnographic analogies in Christopher Tilley’s Material Culture and Text: : The Art of Ambiguity and A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Tilley 1991, 1994). I have chosen these two publications because they represent full monographs rather than articles, and because they have been reassessed recently from a theoretical perspective (Brück 2005).
