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Criticism

The concept of archaeological cultures is itself a divisive subject within the archaeological field. When first developed, archaeologic culture was viewed as a reflection of actual human culture.

...in the traditional view we translate present into past by collecting artifacts into groups, and naming those groups as archaeological cultures. We then make the equation between an archaeological and a human culture by making the assumption that artifacts are the expressions of cultural ideas or norms. (...) This approach (...) was termed "culture history" by many (...).

This view of culture would be "entirely satisfactory if the aim of archaeology was solely the definition and description of these entities." However, as the 1960s rolled around and archaeology sought to be more scientific, archaeologists wanted to do more than just describe artifacts, and the archaeological culture found.

Accusations came that archaeological culture was "idealist" as it assumes that norms and ideas are seen as being "important in the definition of cultural identity." It stresses the particularity of cultures: "Why and how they are different from the adjacent group." Processualists, and other subsequently critics of cultural-historical archaeology argued that archaeological culture treated culture as "just a rag-tag assemblage of ideas."

Archaeological culture is presently useful for sorting and assembling artifacts, especially in European archaeology that often falls towards culture-historical archaeology.