Ethnic and cultural identities

Abstract

From its very start, archaeology has had as one of its central projects the identification of ‘peoples’ (now often termed ‘ethnic groups’) in the past. Such identification has traditionally been made through the study of distributions of material culture, with the geographical spread of characteristic artefacts being seen as marking the territory of a particular group. For many years there was also a widely held assumption that such groups were ‘racially’ linked, sharing a language and a whole suite of cultural practices. In this way, the past was envisaged as occupied by bounded, homogeneous groupings, whose histories, expansions and movements could be traced through looking at their material remains. Indeed, it meant that when changes were seen in the distributions of that material culture, this could only be explained through expansion or movement of that group.

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