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CHAPTER 19
Ethnicity: Theoretical Approaches,
Methodological Implications
Siân Jones
Concepts of race and ethnicity have played an
important role in the production of archaeological
knowledge throughout the history of the discipline.
One of the first questions that antiquarians and archaeologists ask of the physical remains that they
deal with is, Who was responsible for these material
remains? The answers have almost always been sought
in terms of named groups of people, such as the Beaker folk and the Celts of Europe, the Israelites and the
Philistines of the Near East, and the Dorset people and
Pueblo Indians of North America. Embedded in these
attributions are ideas about the nature of the groups
concerned. Here, the concepts of race and ethnicity
have taken center stage, alongside the related concepts
of culture, nation, and tribe. Yet despite their apparently straightforward role in the initial naming and
classification of archaeological remains, race and ethnicity have a checkered history within the discipline.
Their complex and overlapping meanings and uses
have changed dramatically over time, as have the different theories surrounding them. They have also been
implicated in some of the major epistemological shifts
within the discipline. Finally, archaeological interpretations of race and ethnicity have been intricately
bound up with the construction of modern ethnic,
national, and racial identities, adding greater weight
and urgency to the development of critical approaches
to these concepts within the discipline.
In this chapter I intend to dissect the concepts,
theories, and methods surrounding the identification
of past human groups from archaeological remains.
In doing so I will examine other concepts in addition
to ethnic group and ethnicity, in particular race and
culture, because different concepts have been favored
at different times in the history of the discipline. The
main theoretical and methodological developments
informing the identification of past groups of people
throughout the history of archaeology will be discussed. Recent approaches to the archaeological study
of ethnic or cultural identity will then be outlined,
highlighting the main debates and developments.
The contemporary social and political dimensions of
studying ethnicity in archaeology will then be explored, and some future directions will be highlighted
in the concluding section.
Like many disciplines in the human sciences, archaeology was dominated until at least the mid-twentieth
century by an empiricist agenda intent on mapping
the temporal and geographical distribution of cultures and their corresponding ethnic groups.1 Within
this empiricist tradition there has been little discussion of the nature of ethnic groups, or the relationship between ethnicity and cultural difference. Ethnic
groups were simply assumed to represent bounded,
homogeneous entities that can be objectively defined
on the basis of cultural, linguistic, and sometimes biological characteristics. Their very existence was taken
as a given, part of the natural order of things, which
provided an obvious focus for the classification and
interpretation of archaeological remains. However, far
from being part of a self-evident natural order, the
particular modes of classifying human diversity that
prevailed within empiricist archaeology can be traced
back to the nineteenth century, where they have their
origins in the study of racial difference.
RACE, CULTURE, AND LANGUAGE
During the nineteenth century, the study of archaeological remains became bound up in the task of defining the “races” of humanity. A complex range of
theories and definitions developed over this time, but
a number of general trends can be observed. Race was
thought to be the primary basis of human differentiation. Other concepts, later associated with very different forms of group organization and identity, such as
nation, ethnic group, and tribe, were all heavily attributed to race, and consequently often used interchangeably. Races were regarded as discrete objective entities,
each possessing its own unique character. Typology
was the dominant mode of research, and scholars devoted much of their time to identifying and describing
different racial types on the basis of empirical criteria.
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Physical and anatomical features were given a primary
role in the definition of races, but language, psychology, and cultural and intellectual ability were also seen
as important.
Racial determinism was widespread and, to greater
or lesser degrees, racial theories posited a direct relationship between biological and cultural capabilities
(Stepan 1982). Physical features such as cranial shape
and size were assumed to determine cultural and intellectual ability. Research was also devoted to explaining the origins of different races. During the early
and middle nineteenth century theories of race were
dominated by the debate between monogenists and
polygenists, the former arguing that the different races
of humanity had a common origin and the latter that
they had different origins. During the later nineteenth
century, the gradual acceptance of Darwin’s theory of
evolution rendered the debate obsolete, but as Stocking (1968) has revealed, the polygenist emphasis on
the fixity and longevity of racial types persisted until
the end of the nineteenth and into the early decades
of the twentieth century. Furthermore, evolutionary
theory provided a framework for the hierarchical arrangement of “higher” and “lower” races. For more detailed historiographical studies of nineteenth century
theories of race, see George Stocking’s Race, Culture,
and Evolution (1968), Michael Banton’s The Idea of
Race (1977), and I. Hannaford’s Race: The History of
an Idea in the West (1996).
Archaeological research played an important role in
the development of racial typologies and in historical
and evolutionary theories of race. Likewise, theories
of race had an important impact on the development of archaeological theory and method. Human
remains from archaeological sites provided evidence
for the definition of racial types on the basis of metric
analyses of skeletal components. In Europe, the most
common mode of racial classification was based on
measurements of the shape and size of the skull, and
the distinction based on the cephalic index between the
dolichocephalic (long-headed) northern races and the
brachycephalic (round-headed) southern races was to
become particularly significant in debates about European prehistory (Stepan 1982:97–99). Human skeletal
remains were particularly important sources of evidence in debates concerning the longevity of specific
races and disputes concerning the permanence or fluidity of racial traits and groups.
Archaeologists often attributed racial categories to
specific archaeological cultures by making direct associations between material culture and skeletal ma322
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terial. However, the widespread claim that cultural
capabilities were directly tied to racial heritage meant
that archaeologists could apply racial attributions to
their evidence even in the absence of skeletal remains.
During the late nineteenth century, broad similarities
in forms of technology, subsistence, architecture, and
art were used as a means of distinguishing the socalled lower races from the higher races according to
an evolutionary scale ranging from savagery through
barbarism to civilization. With little concern for the
history of particular racial groups, these archaeologists were trying to establish a universal history of race
through the comparative study of both ethnographic
and archaeological material culture. Good examples
of such an approach can be found in the work of General Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, The Evolution of
Culture (1906); and John Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times
(1865).
By the early twentieth century, the emphasis in both
archaeological and anthropological research shifted
away from an overarching concern with social evolution toward the particularistic histories of specific
racial groups and their diffusion. Strong resemblances
between material culture assemblages were regarded
as de facto evidence for a shared racial heritage, or, as
it was often phrased, “affinity of blood.” One of the
forerunners of this approach in Europe was the German scholar Gustaf Kossinna, who developed and applied the method of settlement archaeology ( Kossinna
1911). In order to trace the history of present-day racial
groups, Kossinna argued that the historically attested
settlement of a specific group could be traced back
into prehistory through continuity of material culture. Historical linguistics also provided an important
source of evidence, as race, language, and culture were
assumed to be closely interrelated and coeval with one
another. On the basis of his settlement archaeology,
Kossinna claimed that it was possible to identify major
prehistoric racial groups, such as the Aryans and the
Slavs, and to trace their relationships through time. As
exemplified in his book The Aryans (1926), Gordon
Childe, although of very different political persuasion,
had adopted similar concepts and methodology.
Despite the variety of different theoretical approaches that framed the study of human groups during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one
similarity was the routine conflation of race, language,
and culture. Furthermore, while race arguably provided the dominant mode for understanding human
difference at this time, many scholars used terms such
as “tribe,” “ethnic group,” “nation,” and “people” inter-
changeably with “race.” Consider William Greenwell’s
(1905:306–307) interpretation of two late Iron Age
burials in Yorkshire:
The two cemeteries may be treated as one, for though
there are some differences between the articles discovered in the graves at the two sites, there is so much
in common in their principal and more important
features, that they must be regarded as the burial
places of people whose habits and manner of life
were similar . . . The first question which arises is that
of the race or tribe who were buried at Danes Graves
and Arras, and to what division of the human family
they belonged.
In respect to this question, Greenwell argued that
the “most essential, and perhaps the principal factor
is the physical characteristics of the skeletons themselves.” He admitted that the site of Arras lacked good
skeletal evidence, with only two skulls surviving. Nevertheless, he stated, in the absence of evidence to the
contrary, where such things as grave relics “are found
to be similar in two districts, the presumption is strong
that they were in the main occupied by people who
were united by affinity of blood” (Greenwell 1905:307,
my emphasis).
The conflation of race, language, and culture in
the study of archaeological remains can be confirmed
by a glance though archaeological journals of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Race was
everywhere, whether in identifying the great research
problems of the discipline in anniversary address of
the Society of Antiquaries (Lindsay 1922), or in the
routine application of racial classifications to skeletal
remains (Austin 1928), or through the analysis of racial forms from Sumerian figurines (Langdon 1921).
For recent overviews, see K. Sklenár, Archaeology in
Central Europe (1983); Bruce Trigger, A History of
Archaeological Thought (1989); and Siân Jones, The
Archaeology of Ethnicity (1997).
THE POLITICS OF RACE
Racial typologies and classifications pervaded the
nineteenth century and first few decades of the twentieth century, penetrating many aspects of social life
and informing ideological and political debates. The
idea that the physiological characteristics of particular
races determined cultural and intellectual ability, allied with evolutionary theories, provided a convenient
way to justify slavery and colonialism, by placing indigenous inhabitants lower down on the evolutionary ladder and European “civilization” at the top. To
maintain this idealized evolutionary racial hierarchy,
archaeologists went to great lengths to attribute sites
and assemblages which appeared to be too “sophisticated” for the supposedly backward non-European
races, to migrating races of European or Near Eastern
origin, despite evidence to the contrary. See Peter Garlake’s book on Great Zimbabwe (1973) for discussion
of a classic example. Further case studies are provided
by contributions to a number of books in the One
World Archaeology Series, in particular Archaeological
Approaches to Cultural Identity (Shennan 1989a); and
Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power
(Bond and Gilliam 1994).
The concept of race played an equally important
role in European politics of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Nations were conceived of in racial terms and states justified their actions toward one
another and their own populations on the basis of
racial theory (Stepan 1982). Archaeological evidence
was employed in competition between nation-states as
to whose racial pedigree was superior and which nations had played a decisive role in the development of
European civilization. The Nazi regime used the work
of archaeologists, including Gustaf Kossinna, to support its misplaced claims about the superiority of the
“Germanic race” over other constructed racial groups,
such as the Jews and the Slavs, contributing to the ideological apparatus which supported the destruction of
millions of the European Jewry in the Holocaust (Arnold 1990; MacCann 1990). The work of German archaeologists concerning the distribution of Germanic
settlement in prehistory was also used to justify German claims to parts of Poland after World War I and
during World War II (Arnold 1990; Wijwarra 1996).
Other European nations also employed archaeological
evidence in support of racial theories used to legitimate their relationships with others. The English, for
instance, used archaeological evidence to emphasize
their Roman and Anglo-Saxon heritage and to justify
their superiority over the Welsh, Scots, and Irish, all
considered racially inferior (Hingley 2000).
CULTURE HISTORY AND TYPOLOGY
The political importance of race in contemporary society partly explains its persistence as a concept in the
humanities and social sciences, including archaeology,
until the 1920s and 1930s. However, the politics of
race also contributed to its demise within the social
sciences due to abhorrence at the contemporary institutions and practices that it was associated with. Although there were sporadic critiques of the concept of
Ethnicity: Theoretical Approaches, Methodological Implications
323
race and the theories surrounding it in earlier decades,
racial typology and racial determinism were widely
challenged between the 1930s and 1950s (Huxley and
Haddon 1935; UNESCO 1950). In particular the correlation of cultural and physical groupings and the
assumed racial determination of mental, cultural, and
linguistic capabilities were questioned. Archaeologists
contributed to such debates; Grafton Elliott Smith
was a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s
Race and Culture Committee in 1933, when the appropriateness of the concept of race for archaeological
analysis started to be questioned. In an article entitled
“Races, Peoples, and Cultures in Prehistoric Europe,”
Childe (1933:198; see also 1935) argued that any confusion between sociological and linguistic similarity and physiological similarity should be studiously
avoided. “Culture need not correspond to a group
allied by physical traits acquired by heredity. Culture
is a social heritage; it corresponds to a community
sharing common traditions, common institutions and
a common way of life. Such a group may reasonably be
called a people.” Childe (1935:199) then went on to argue that the material culture of past societies should be
able to identify past peoples or ethnic groups, but not
races, and therefore that “prehistoric archaeology has a
good hope of establishing an ethnic history of Europe,
while a racial one seems hopelessly remote.”
Although influenced by recent developments in the
science of genetics, such arguments were also specifically designed to counter the political use of archaeology in support of racial inequality in the present. So,
for instance, Childe’s critique was directed at attempts
to correlate the Indo-European culture and language
group with the Nordic race. “Confusions between race
and language persist only in the minds of the most
superficial journalists and bigoted politicians” (Childe
1933:200). This concern to distinguish race from ethnic
and cultural forms of differentiation was heightened
following World War II and outrage at the political appropriation of the past under the Third Reich.
As Ian Hodder (1991a:x) pointed out in his review
of European archaeological theory, “Few archaeologists
in Europe can work without the shadow of the misuse
of the past for nationalistic purposes during the Third
Reich.” In the immediate aftermath of World War II,
overt ethnic interpretations of archaeological remains
were rejected due to the traditional conflation of ethnic
groups with races. German archaeologists retreated
into a descriptive, empiricist approach with little reference to peoples such as the “Germani” or the “IndoEuropeans” (Härke 1995:56; Veit 1989:42). However, a
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strong empiricist tradition focusing on the identification of archaeological culture areas had already come
to dominate the practice of archaeology. For instance,
by the 1920s the archaeological literature in Britain was
littered with references to cultures, such as the Dorian
culture (Casson 1921) and the Halstatt culture (Fox
1923:85). Furthermore, explicit statements about the
basis for such reconstructions of the past, although few
in number, reveal that the underlying epistemology
was not far removed from that of Kossinna and others
concerned with the identification of past races. So, for
example, the British archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford
stated that “culture may be defined as the sum of all
the ideals and activities and material which characterise a group of human beings. It is to a community what
character is to an individual” (Crawford 1921:79, my
emphasis). Archaeologists, he stated, should aim to
discover “homogeneous cultures” through the analysis
of a broad range of types and their distribution in space
and time (Crawford 1921:132).
By the mid-twentieth century, the definition of culture areas had become the principal means by which
prehistory was delineated in space and time, expressed
in maps, tables, and charts as a mosaic of discrete,
homogeneous peoples and cultures (Hawkes 1940:
map 4; table 4). The only real distinction with earlier
approaches was that the concept of race, and any attempt to correlate cultural and racial categories (i.e.,
those based on physical/anatomical features), became
increasingly rare in the archaeological literature. As
Veit (1989:42) has pointed out, the “archaeological
culture” became “a quasi-ideology free substitute” for
the terms “race” and “ethnic unit” yet still implied that
people lurked behind such archaeological groupings.
Thus the same basic paradigm that was used politically
within Nazi Germany, only without explicit reference
to past peoples or races, also came to form the rudimentary framework for a worldwide empiricist archaeology dominated by classification and typology.
As with all empiricist traditions, what was lacking
was any critique of the underlying categories and assumptions which framed culture-historical archaeology (for a notable exception, see Tallgren 1937). For
the most part, it is assumed that the classificatory
concepts employed are derived from the object of
study. So, for instance, it has often been argued that
the culture-historical approach in archaeology (see
Webster, chapter 2) is a product of the need to establish a system for classifying the spatial and temporal
variation evident in the archaeological record (Trigger
1978:86; Paddayya 1995:139). The implication is that
culture history involves the description and classification of variation in material remains without reference
to preconceived concepts or theory. Clearly it cannot
be denied that human ways of life vary in space and
time and that this variation is frequently manifested
in some form or another in material culture. However,
the particular classificatory framework developed in
archaeology in order to deal with such variation was,
and still is, based on certain assumptions about the
nature of cultural diversity.
The dominance of the culture concept in twentieth-century archaeology reflects an important shift
away from the racial classifications of human diversity. Nevertheless, the normative concept of culture (see
Webster, chapter 2) that replaced race carried over
many assumptions that were central to nineteenthcentury ideas, in particular an overriding concern with
holism, homogeneity, order, and boundedness. Normative theories of culture are based on the idea that
within a given group cultural practices and beliefs tend
to conform to prescriptive ideational norms or rules
of behavior. These norms are maintained by regular
interaction within the group, and the transmission
of shared cultural norms to subsequent generations
through the process of socialization, which purportedly results in a continuous, homogeneous cultural tradition. Childe (1956:8) was explicit about this process,
arguing that “generation after generation has followed
society’s prescription and produced and reproduced in
thousands of instances the socially approved standard
type.” An archaeological type is just that.
A culture, comprised of a set of distinctive norms,
was regarded as the product of a particular society, or
ethnic group, and at the same time assumed to provide the distinguishing characteristics of that group.
Within an archaeological framework such ideas led to
the assumption of a fixed and one-to-one relationship
between material types and particular ethnic groups.
Furthermore, it enabled archaeologists to identify past
peoples or ethnic groups through the identification of
(material) cultural traits, which was assumed to be an
objective mode of inquiry. Gradual changes in these
traits were attributed to internal drift in the prescribed
cultural norms of a particular group, whereas sudden
large-scale changes were explained in terms of external influences, such as diffusion resulting from culture contact, or the succession of one cultural group
by another as a result of migration and conquest:
“Distributional changes [in diagnostic types] should
reflect displacements of population, the expansions,
migrations, colonizations or conquests with which
literary history is familiar” (Childe 1956:135). These
ideas provided the underlying framework for the reconstruction of culture history, but they were soon
to be challenged within archaeology as elsewhere in
the human sciences. For readers who wish to find out
more about culture history, see chapter 2 in this volume, contributions to Hodder (1991b) for summaries
of its place in European archaeological traditions, and
contributions to Ucko (1995) for discussion of developments in other parts of the world.
RECENT APPROACHES AND DEBATES
Up until the 1960s, as the emphasis in social sciences
became one of documenting cultural diversity empirically, anthropology, and archaeology underwent
a concerted shift from the concept of race to that of
culture. At this point, however, the parallels cease.
Whereas anthropology continued its shift from culture to ethnicity in the 1960s, the direction of archaeological research changed altogether. Ethnic groups
became a marginal area of research due to the demise
of culture history as a dominant paradigm, at least in
Anglo-American archaeology. This New Archaeology
was stimulated by disillusionment with the descriptive, empiricist nature of traditional archaeological
research (see Watson, chapter 3). While traditional archaeology had been largely satisfied with tracing what
happened in prehistory in terms of cultures and their
movements, archaeologists in the 1950s and 1960s
became increasingly concerned with how and even
why cultural change occurred in the past (Willey and
Phillips 1958:5–6; Binford 1962).
The normative concept of culture, which had dominated traditional archaeology, was overturned within
New Archaeology. It was argued that culture constitutes an integrated system, made up of different functioning subsystems, and as a corollary archaeological
remains must be regarded as the product of a variety
of past processes, rather than simply a reflection of
ideational norms (Binford 1962, 1965; Clarke 1978).
Culture was conceptualized as an adaptive mechanism, and a number of functionalist-oriented ecological and neoevolutionary approaches were developed
with the aim of analyzing various dimensions of past
sociocultural systems. In particular, research focused
on the application of predictive law-like models in the
interpretation of technological and economic systems,
but other dimensions of society such as ideology,
political organization, and symbolism, also became
distinct foci of analysis within the systemic approach
(for a historical review, see Trigger 1989).
Ethnicity: Theoretical Approaches, Methodological Implications
325
Thus descriptive historical reconstructions of past
cultures and peoples were pushed into the background
in the functionalist and processual analysis, with ethnic
groups marginalized to a sterile position in traditional
descriptive culture history, as reflected in the decline
in explicit references to ethnic entities in the literature
(Olsen and Kobylinski 1991:10). The main exception
has been in the field of historical archaeology, where
the existence of historical references to specific ethnic
groups has resulted in the perpetuation of the ethnic
labeling of sites and objects.
Nevertheless, although recent archaeological studies have been committed to explaining settlement systems, trade networks, social ranking, political systems,
and ideology, the traditional culture unit has survived
as the basic unit of description and classification,
inevitably shadowed by the implicit connotation of a
corresponding social or ethnic group, even where such
a correlation has been criticized. For instance, Bradley
(1984:89, 94) makes frequent references to the Wessex culture, Renfrew (1972:187, 191; 1973:187) to the
Phylokopi I culture and the Copper Age cultures of the
Balkans, and Sherratt (1982:17) to the Szakálhát and
Tisza cultures.
For some (Binford 1965) the retention of a normative culture concept was justified, because, although
functional aspects of material culture were no longer
considered to be appropriate for the identification of
cultures or ethnic groups, such information was still
assumed to be held in nonfunctional stylistic traits.
However, many people adopted a pragmatic position similar to Renfrew (1972; 1979; Hodson 1980),
who argued that the archaeological culture and the
typological method were still necessary for the basic
description and classification of the “facts” prior to the
process of explanation (Renfrew 1972:17):
While the simple narration of events is not an explanation, it is a necessary preliminary. We are not
obliged to reject Croce’s statement (quoted in Collingwood 1946, 192): “History has only one duty: to narrate the facts,” but simply to find it insufficient. The
first, preliminary goal of an archaeological study must
be to define the culture in question in space and time.
Only when the culture has been identified, defined
and described is there any hope of “taking it apart”
to try to reach some understanding of how it came to
have its own particular form.
This statement reveals the distinction between empirical description and classification (where and when
questions), and social explanation and interpretation
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(how and why questions) that has been, and continues
to be, intrinsic to a great deal of recent social/processual archaeology. Cultures and ethnic groups remain
firmly located at the empirical descriptive level of
archaeological research, while other aspects of society
are seen as components making up a dynamic cultural
system (Renfrew 1972). Recently, such a distinction
between empirical description and explanation has
been the focus of critiques by those influenced by
poststructuralist theory (Hodder 1986; Shanks and
Tilley 1992; Tilley 1991; see Shanks, chapter 9). Nevertheless, these do not, for the most part, reconsider
the interpretation of group identity in archaeology,
focusing instead largely on symbolic and ideological
systems.
However, at the same time as the New Archaeology
had taken hold in archaeology, anthropological and
sociological research was bringing about a sea change
in our understanding of the relationship between culture and group identity and processes involved in the
maintenance of group boundaries. During the 1950s
and 1960s ethnographic fieldwork such as that by
Leach (1954) among the Kachin and Shan in Highland
Burma and Moerman (1965) among the Lue of northern Thailand highlighted the incongruity of cultural,
linguistic, and political boundaries. Furthermore, the
ethnic boundaries asserted by people in day-to-day
life often could not be identified on the basis of objective discontinuities in language, culture, polity, and
territory. Instead, ethnic boundaries appeared to be
a product of interaction between groups and an opposition between us and them. Thus. In his study of
the Lue people, Moerman found that the Lue shared
many material and linguistic traits in common with
their neighbors, and that the characteristics that they
identified as Lue traits varied from one area to another.
Yet his study revealed that identification as Lue in daily
life was an important aspect of social organization.
Moerman (1965:1216) concluded that “the Lue, at
least, cannot be viewed in isolation if one is to define
their ‘Lueness,’ identify them as a tribe, and understand how they survive in modern Thailand. . . . The
Lue cannot be identified—cannot, in a sense, be said
to exist—in isolation.”
By the late 1960s and 1970s such ethnographic accounts were being drawn together in producing new
theories of ethnicity and the processes involved in the
maintenance of group identity (Barth 1969a; Cohen
1974; Glazer and Moynihan 1975). Many points were
synthesized in Frederick Barth’s (1969b) seminal introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Barth
criticized the traditional equation of race = language =
culture, arguing that there is rarely one-to-one correlation between boundaries in these different domains
and that boundaries are a product of social interaction
rather than social/geographic isolation. Ethnic identities, and the boundaries associated with them, should
be seen as products of active social processes, involving the construction of an opposition between “us”
and “them” on the basis of selective and subjective use
of cultural and linguistic differences. Such processes
are, he argued, embedded in economic and political
relationships between groups and thus ethnic boundaries can be involved in the pursuit and maintenance
of interests, giving them an instrumental dimension.
Moreover, ethnic identity is fluid and flexible with
changes in individual identity leading to a flow of
personnel across ethnic boundaries (for example, see
case studies by Haaland 1969, focusing on the Fur and
Baggara of the Sudan, and Barth 1969c, focusing on
the Pathans of Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Many of these arguments are now part of mainstream theories of ethnicity in the social sciences.
The instrumentalist position of Barth and others has
been criticized leading to a reconsideration of the
relationship between culture and ethnicity (Bentley
1987; Eriksen 1991). Nevertheless, ethnic identity is
still regarded as the aspect of a person’s self-concept
that results from identification with a broader group.
In opposition to others, on the basis of perceived
cultural differentiation and/or common descent (for
overviews, see Eriksen 1993; Banks 1996).
By the 1970s and 1980s, developments in social
anthropology affected two main areas of archaeological research. The first consists of studies concerned
with the relationship between material culture and
ethnic symbolism. For instance, on the basis of ethnoarchaeological research in Baringo, Kenya, Hodder
(1982) argued that there is rarely a one-to-one correlation between cultural similarities and differences
and ethnic groups. He demonstrated that the kinds
of material culture involved in ethnic symbolism can
vary between different groups, and that the expression
of ethnic boundaries may involve a limited range of
material culture, while other material forms and styles
may be shared across group boundaries. Others studies include R. Haaland’s (1977) research on Sudanese
Nubia, A. Praetzellis et al.’s (1987) examination of Chinese American identity, and R. Larick’s (1986, 1991)
analysis of Loikop (Sanbura) spears.
The second main area of research concerned the
role of ethnicity in the structuring of economic and
political relationships. Thus, for instance, Hodder (see
Blackmore et al. 1979) also showed how the maintenance of ethnic boundaries in the Baringo district
related to modes of subsistence and control over
resources. Drawing on this ethnoarchaeological research, he and others attempted to examine of similar
processes in Late Iron Age Britain. A rather different
example is provided by Brumfiel’s (1994) analysis of
ethnicity in the Aztec state. State representations of
identity, she argues, were fashioned to suit the needs
of particular political factions. The Aztecs sought to
override particularistic ethnic identities within regional elites, but at the same time promoted derogatory ethnic stereotypes which served to reinforce the
superiority of the civil state culture.
While focusing on ethnicity as an active social process rather than a passive reflection of shared cultural
norms, such approaches perpetuate the idea of ethnic
groups as discrete, coherent wholes. This emphasis on
wholes is amply demonstrated by the prevalence of
terms such as “group” and “boundary,” which imply
the existence of distinct entities (cf. R. Cohen 1978:386,
with relation to anthropology). In the past decade,
however, a few archaeologists have started to challenge the very existence of ethnic groups in the form
of bounded, monolithic, territorially based entities
(Shennan 1989b; Thomas 1996; R. Jones 1997, 2002; S.
Jones 1997). Instead, it is argued that the construction
of ethnicity (and cultural identity in general) is a situational and dynamic process that can take diverse forms
in different contexts of social interaction. The material world is used for identity construction as well as
the communication of similarity and difference which
ethnicity inevitably entails. Thus, from an archaeological perspective, it cannot be assumed that there is any
fixed relationship between particular material types
and particular identities. Rather than neat, coherent
cultural entities, the resulting pattern is more likely
to be a complex web of overlapping styles of material
culture relating to changeable expression of ethnicity in different social contexts. Such an approach has
important implications, both for the interpretation of
ethnicity in archaeology, as well as the underlying classification of archaeological evidence, relying as it does
on normative conceptions of culture (for case studies, see Jones and Richards 2000; Wells 1998; Thomas
1996; A. Jones 1998, 2002). Studies focusing on the
discourses involved in the construction of identity, and
particularly the role of myth and tradition, are also
proving productive, for instance see Jonathan Hall’s
study of Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997).
Ethnicity: Theoretical Approaches, Methodological Implications
327
Considered together, the developments which have
taken place in archaeology over the last three decades
have overturned a number of the assumptions central
to traditional culture history: (1) the idea that that a
one-to-one relationship persists between cultures and
ethnic groups; (2) the existence of discrete, homogeneous cultures; and (3) the idea that group identities
relate to distinct, territorially based social entities.
However, studies focusing on ethnicity are still sporadic and tend to be confined to specific, isolated case
studies. Consequently, ethnicity, as well as the relationship between cultures and ethnic groups, remains
a problematic area of archaeological analysis. On the
one hand, the identification of ethnic groups is based
on implicit assumptions inherited from traditional
archaeology, and located in the domain of the supposedly pretheoretical description of the empirical
evidence. On the other, ethnicity has been elevated, in
a few instances, to the status of social process, subject
to archaeological explanation. An artificial dichotomy
between empirical description and social interpretation persists in a great deal of archaeological research
and the position attributed to ethnicity within this
dichotomy is ambivalent.
THE PRESENT PAST: THE POLITICS OF ETHNICITY
Of all the recent developments relating to ethnicity
in archaeology, perhaps the most significant in terms
of its impact on the discipline as a whole is the recent
concern with the role of archaeology in the construction and legitimation of modern identities. The 1980s
and 1990s witnessed an increasing body of conferences
and publications dealing with the sociopolitics of archaeology in general, and specifically with the ways in
which archaeology intersects with the construction
of identities in the present (for recent examples, see
Atkinson et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu and Champion
1996; Graves-Brown et al. 1996). As I have already
indicated, early attempts to equate archaeological remains with specific races were tied up with the politics
of empire and the legitimation of social inequality
between different so-called races in the present. Now
a much broader critique has emerged dominated by a
concern to expose the effects of nationalist interests on
the discipline. This is epitomized by the definition of
“nationalist archaeology” as a specific type of archaeology by Trigger (1984:385), a prominent historian of
the discipline. Furthermore, numerous case studies
have emerged documenting, for instance, how Gallic resistance to the Roman Empire played a key role
in the construction of French national consciousness
328
s iâ n j on es
(Dietler 1994; Fleury-Ilett 1996) or how archaeology
has been actively used to support a direct genealogical
relationship between the modern state of Israel and
the ancient Israelites, and hence to legitimate Israeli
territorial claims (Glock 1994; Whitelam 1996).
It has also been shown that nationalism has had a
more profound effect on the discipline through the
very concepts of culture and identity which are employed (Díaz-Andreu 1996; S. Jones 1996). As Handler
(1988:8) points out, “Nationalist ideologies and social scientific inquiry developed in the same historical context—that of the post-Renaissance European
world—and . . . the two have reacted upon one another
from their beginnings.” Nations, he argues, are considered “individuated beings.” Endowed with the reality
of natural things, they are assumed to be bounded,
continuous, and precisely distinguishable from other
analogous entities (Handler 1988:6, 15). The idea of
culture is intricately enmeshed with nationalist discourse; it is culture which distinguishes between nations and which constitutes the content of national
identity. Moreover, “culture symbolises individuated
existence: the assertion of cultural particularity is another way of proclaiming the existence of a unique
collectivity” (Handler 1988:39).
There are striking similarities between the representation of culture in nationalist discourses and the
academic concepts of culture and society, which are
regarded as bounded, homogeneous entities, occupying exclusive spatio-temporal positions (Clifford
1988; Handler 1988). The concept of an archaeological culture represents a particular variant of this formula. As discussed above, bounded material culture
complexes are assumed to be the material manifestation of past peoples, who shared a set of prescriptive
learned norms of behavior. Archaeological cultures
came to be regarded as organic, individuated entities,
the prehistorian’s substitute for the individual agents
which make up the historian’s repertoire: “prehistory
can recognize peoples and marshal them on the stage
to take the place of the personal actors who form the
historian’s troupe.” (Childe 1940:2; see also Piggott
1965:7). Moreover, as in the case of contemporary
claims concerning the relationship between nations
and cultures, the relationship between archaeological cultures and past peoples is based on teleological
reasoning in that culture is both representative of, and
constitutive of, the nation or people concerned: “the
almost a priori belief in the existence of the culture follows inevitably from the belief that a particular human
group . . . exists. The existence of the group is in turn
predicated on the existence of a particular culture”
(Handler 1988:39).
The problem is that such an approach to the past has
enabled history, place, and people to be tied together
in the exclusive and monolithic fashion reinforcing
essentialist representations of ethnic and national
identity in the present. Furthermore, the definition of
ethnic or tribal groups on the basis of the culture concept has traditionally invoked an inventory of cultural,
linguistic, and material traits. As Devalle (1992:234)
indicates, “The resulting picture has been one of people with a ‘museum culture,’ uprooted from the deep
historical field, devoid of dynamism and meaning.”
The consequences of such an approach are also manifest beyond academia. In political policy, administrative practice, legislation, heritage management, and
education, in preserving the site of Great Zimbabwe,
for instance, only one particular architectural phase
in the highly complex past of the monument is being
reconstructed, which reifies the monument as part of
the national heritage and denies contemporary, heterogeneous beliefs and practices associated with the
monument (Ucko 1994:271). Many other examples
abound, ranging from Stonehenge (Bender 1993:269–
270; 1998) to Australian Aboriginal rock art (Ucko
1983:33–36), where reconstruction or conservation
has resulted in the reification of particular, supposedly “authentic,” moments in the history of particular
sites or material remains, and their extrapolation from
ongoing social life.
In such contexts archaeology has often been used
to provide a static set of reference points where previously there was negotiation and dynamism. Through
its concept of homogeneous archaeological cultures,
traditional culture-historical archaeology has objectified culture by reconstructing a coherent linear narrative measured in terms of objectified events, such
as contacts, migrations and conquests, with intervals
of homogeneous, empty time in between them. This
approach is particularly suited to the construction
of national traditions, which as Devalle (1992:21)
points out, is “concerned with establishing a legitimating continuity with the past, not with understanding
historical discontinuities and the evolution of social
contradictions.”
Recent research into gene distributions adds
a further dimension to debates about archaeology
and politics. Attempts to correlate zones of genetic
change with cultural linguistic and ethnic boundaries (Cavelli-Sforza et al. 1994; Sokal et al. 1993) have
stimulated much discussion about the methodologi-
cal validity and the political implications of such research (Mirza and Dungworth 1995; Pluciennik 1995;
Terrell and Stewart 1996). As Evison (1996) points
out, comparing genetic diversity to social and cultural diversity is worthy of study. However, existing
work does not adequately address the problems of
delimiting ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries,
and instead revives the traditional culture = people
model taking archaeological cultures as evidence for
past ethnic groups (Plucienik 1995). The problems
of such an approach to the archaeological evidence,
which fails to take into account the transitory and
fluid nature of ethnic identity, have been discussed
above. Furthermore, as Pluciennik (1995) and Mirza
and Dungworth (1995) point out, it is essential that
the political ramifications of such research be subject
to widespread debate. Certainly claims that genetic
relationships of European populations reflect their
ethnohistorical affinities (Sokal et al. 1993) are likely
to be used to provide an additional dimension of
biological concreteness to contemporary politicized
claims regarding ethnohistorical continuity, whatever
the intentions of the authors.
CONCLUSION
Recent research focusing on ethnicity in archaeology
has overturned many traditional assumptions about
the discrete, bounded and homogeneous nature of
cultures, and the straightforward link between culture
and identity central to culture historical archaeology.
However, there is a pressing need for further research,
not least because of the contemporary political and
ethical issues raised by archaeological studies of culture and ethnicity. Clearly, traditional approaches to
race and ethnicity in archaeology have enabled history,
place, and people to be tied together in an exclusive
and monolithic fashion, reinforcing essentialist representations of ethnic and national identity in the
present. The challenge for archaeologists is twofold.
First, we need to recognize the relationship between
present constructions of group identity and our interpretations of the past. Second, rather than abandon the study of ethnicity and identity, we need to
pursue more sophisticated analytical and interpretive
approaches to avoid imposing essentialist perspectives
on the past.
The research terrain is changing rapidly, producing
new questions and approaches to group identity quite
distinct from the traditional preoccupation with cultures or stylistic zones and boundaries. I will conclude
by highlighting some of those that, in my opinion,
Ethnicity: Theoretical Approaches, Methodological Implications
329
represent exciting and productive avenues for future
research. Science-based analysis of material culture
has immense potential to provide insights into the
wide variety of practices involved in the production,
use, and consumption of artifacts (A. Jones 2002). For
instance, thin-sectioning and residue analysis of the
pottery from the Neolithic settlement of Barnhouse
has enabled the identification of multiple levels of
differentiation within the village, at the village level
beyond, which would have informed the recognition
and expression of identities in different contexts at
different times (A. Jones 2002:chaps. 6–7; Richards,
in press). Practice-based and phenomenological approaches that explore the ways in which past identities
are created through engagement with architecture and
landscape are also proving particularly productive (A.
Jones 1998; Richards, in press; Tilley 1994). Furthermore, studies focusing on the ways in which the social
lives of objects and monuments are tied up in the
creation of identities and the legitimation of power
in the past enable exploration of the role of the past
in the past, as well as in the present (Thomas 1996:
chap. 6; Hingley 1996). Within historical archaeology
exciting work is being carried out into relationship
between group identities and the negotiation of power
in colonial contexts (Funari 1998; Mattingly 1997;
Orser 1996, 1998; Webster 2001; Weik 1997). Finally,
studies of how specific monuments and landscapes are
involved in the production of multiple identities are
providing more in-depth and subtle understandings
of the relationship between archaeology, ethnicity/nationalism, and other forms of identity in the modern
world (Bender 1998; Bender and Winer 2001).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the editors for inviting me to
contribute to this volume and Colin Richards for his
comments on a draft version of this chapter.
NOTE
1. Empiricism is the system which accepts only knowledge
based on direct experience.
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