Abstract
The Bronze Age has sometimes been presented as the first period of ‘globalisation’ or ‘world system’ in Europe. I propose that in order to apply such terms onto the past, we first need to understand the meaning of culture and how it is constituted. I wish to propose that the concept of culture has been employed in two different ways in archeology: from 1860s to 1960s, culture was predominantly used in an instrumental way, as a means to classify the past in time and space. Typology was the method. As there existed no theory on the meaning of culture, early attempts to equate culture and people were flawed, as we know.
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Kristiansen, K. (2011). Constructing Social and Cultural Identities in the Bronze Age. In: Roberts, B., Vander Linden, M. (eds) Investigating Archaeological Cultures. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6970-5_10
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