Diffusionism

1. Diffusionism • Viennese school of anthropology • Fritz Graebner (1877-1934) • Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954) • Single series of cultures developed in central Asia and diffused from there. • Complex cultural variations resulted from blending of cultures at different levels of development • Oswald Menghin (1888-1973) (Austrian) brought this approach to Argentina after WWII. • Menghinespoused a culture-historical archaeology that rejected cultural evolution and psychic unity and embraced primitive monothesim and degeneration.

2. English Diffusionist Ethnology • W.H.R. Rivers (1864-1922) diffusionist • In 1914, found no evidence of evolutionary pattern in study of Oceanic societies • Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937) • Believed embalming invented in Egypt. From there it degenerated to other parts of the world. • From there, argued that all cultural developments occurred in Egypt, the “Archaic Civilization”, and carried to other parts of the world by merchants searching for raw materials. • Influence by Egyptians acted as an “exotic leaven” that stimulated the development of agriculture and civilization in other parts of the world. • Societies like Maya degenerated when cut off from Egypt. • William James Perry, University of London • Children of the Sun (1923) and The Growth of Civilization (1924) • Outlined broad parallels in religious beliefs and political organization using diffusion as an explanation. • Lord Raglan (1939) argued that Mesopotamia not Egypt was the crucible of culture. • Rivers, Perry, and Raglan all shared a belief that • humans are naturally primitive and revert to savagery if not prevented from doing so by ruling classes. • Savages do not invent • The development of civilization and the Industrial Revolution were accidents • Religion was main element in development and spread of civilization. • Some European archaeologists suggested that megalithic tombs were degenerated examples of Egyptian pyramids.

3. By the 1920s accumulated evidence made hyperdiffusionism difficult to sustain. • Old World and New World cultures were obviously distinct, and thus must have developed indepdently. • Under the program of diffusionisim, started in the 1880s, invenstions as simple as pottery were thought to have been invented only once. • Chronologies, not yet based on radiocarbon, were not sufficiently corss-dated to rule out single invention models.

4. Archaeologists who emphasized diffusion accepted that members of one culture could learn from another. • This left open some optimism for the capacity of a society to change. • W.M.F. Petrie (1939) attributed all cultural changes in Egypt to the process of mass migration and the arrival of smaller groups. • Biological and cultural mingling created a blend. • Neolithic Fayum culture was a “Solutrean migration from the Caucasus” • Amratianwhile-lined pottery arrived by “Libyan invasions” • Gerzeanculture was brought to Egypt by “Eastern Desert Folk” • Egypt was eventually unified by a “Dynastic Race” that originated in Iran. • The arguments were built on slim resemblances and more general, now obvious patterns, were ignored. • For Pietrie there could be no cultural change without biological change.

5. William Johnson Sollas (1849-1936) shared aspects of evolutionist and diffusionist thinking. • Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives (1911) • Exhibits use of evolution in comparing successive stages of Paleolithic development with modern hunter-gatherers. • Sollasmaintained that the modern counterparts of Paleolithic groups were expelled by advanced races. • He believed that these primitive groups, that he compared to the Paleolithic, were the unchanged living descendents of the Paleolithic.

6. Growing interest in geographical distribution of material culture. • This was largely by archaeologists interested in Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages rather than Paleolithic. • The European emphasis on evolutionary succession would be replaced by a historical orientation.

7. Gustaf Oscar Montelius (1843-1921), Swedish archaeologists who played a role in bringing about this shift. • Oriented in Thomsen’s and Worsaae’s approaches. • In 1876 and 1879, Montelius traveled Europe studying collections. He became the first archaeologist to investigate archaeology on a continental scale. • Montelius’ typological method was a refinement of Thomsen’s chronological approach. Montelius worked to develop a series of regional chronologies based on closed finds. • After comparing 200-300 closed finds, clusters of associations could be identified and used for building subdivisions. • Monteliusgreatly refined the method of seriation. • From the chronological sequences based on formal criteria drawn from closed finds, he identified evolutionary trends within the sequences.

8. Montelius drew parallels between the evolution of material culture and biological organisms. His thinking more influenced by Scandinavian archaeologists than by Darwin. Following Enlightenment philosophers, Montelius believed humans used the power of reason to develop more effective ways of coping with nature. • Significantly, some of Montelius’s evolutionary patterns were not unilinear. In detailing the evolution of material culture, he incorporated idiosyncratic factors as well as logical ones. • Montelius believed cultural development occurred in Middle East and diffused to Europe through migrations through the Balkans and Italy. This was why he believed that during prehistory southeastern Europe was more advanced than northern and western Europe. • Montelius’s diffusion gave rise to the ex orientelux“light from the east” school of archaeology. • Montelius’s scheme required a belief in: • 1) diffusion over long periods of time • 2) cultural cores that diffuse outward.

9. The culture core/periphery is also a central concept in Boasian anthropology. Boas also made the age/area assumption that is more widely distributed traits were probably older than those with more restricted territories. • Roland B. Dixon (1928) would later attack the concept of cultural cores and the age/area assumption. Yet, in Europe these ideas were neither articulated clearly nor critiqued. • The critiques against Montelius were not focused on the assumption of a core area, but rather on his selection of the Middle East as the core. Many European archaeologists viewed Europe as the center of civilization. • Carl Schuchhardt (1859-1943) and Aldof Furtwangler (1853-1907) argued that Mycenaean and Greek civilizations were the product of Aryan invaders from the north.

10. A growing interest in ethnicity stimulated an increasing application of the concept of the archaeological culture. • “The term ‘culture’ seems first to have been used in Italian and Spanish, where it originally referred to the cultivation of the human mind.” • What does the OED say? • By 17th C., referred to a distinctive way of live. • Herder asserted that each people (Volk) had their own culture (Kultur). • In French, the term was “civilisation”. • In Germany, Kultur came to refer to slowly changing tribal or peasant groups while rapidly changing cosmopolitan dwellers of urban centers had “Zivilisation”.

11. After 1780, Kulturgeschichte (culture history) proliferated. • In 1843, Gustav Klemm published General Culture History of Humanity and General Ethnology. • FreidrichRatzel grounded his antievolutionary theory on the concept of culture to “denote distinctive ways of life transmitted by specific peoples from one generation to another as well as on the concept of diffusion”. • As early as 1865, Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917) was aware of Klemm’s use of culture. • In 1871, in the book Primitive Culture Tylor provided the now classic definition of culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. • 19thC. evolutionists used the term culture in the singular. It referred to knowledge and belief of humanity as transmitted by teaching and imitation, it was believed to grow more complex over time. • This contrasted with the German use of the word culture, often in plural, to designate distinct life ways of various peoples. • Childe (1935) suggested that the concept of an archaeological culture was “forced” on Scandinavian archaeologists because of the wealth of variability during the Neolithic. • The oldest known use of the term culture in an archaeological case is Thomsen’s contribution to the Lederaad (1836). • In this work, Thomsen refers to the diffusion of technological knowledge from one culture to another. • Worsaae, in DanmarksOldtid (1843) uses the term culture to designate archaeological entities like “higher cultures” and “later cultures” • Thomsen and Worssae were aware that different cultures co-existed.