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An Archaeological Approach to the Study of Cultural Stability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2018

Extract

The study of cultural stability requires a knowledge of cultural development over a reasonably long span of time. The definition of this time perspective is one of the major contributions of archaeology to the study of culture. The archaeologist therefore should be in a position to make a significant contribution to the appraisal of the stability problem itself. However, the lack of a commonly accepted anthropological definition of the concept of cultural stability imposes semantic difficulties which hinder the determination of practical limits for the stability- instability problem area. Moreover, the nature of the data available to the archaeologist conditions the kind of contribution he can make.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society for American Archaeology 1955

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References

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