Paper long abstract:

Archaeological heuristics has long been a feature of investigation and discourse in the discipline. In the Anglophone world, the use of heuristics reached its zenith with the explicit generation and discussion of 'models' in archaeology in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Throughout the past century, discourse has routinely featured the deployment of particular heuristic devices to aid interpretation. 'Culture' is one among such devices, and the concept of 'cultural traditions' underpinned historicist approaches to archaeological interpretation that were labeled by the advocates of a 'New Archaeology' in the 1960's as the 'culture-historical' tradition of archaeological research.

This later observation pinpoints two aspects of the use of 'tradition' in archaeology: as a label for 'schools of thought', and as a short-hand for the descent of cultural practices. It is primarily with the latter that I shall be concerned here. The focus is nonetheless upon interpretive writing in archaeology, rather than with genealogies of practice per se. Nor is my study one that concerns itself with historiography as such. The questions that I wish to investigate are: "how has the use of the term 'tradition' worked in practice as a heuristic device in archaeology? Has the term outlived its usefulness as a heuristic for the descent of practices and for the existence of cultural continuity within a 'framework' of continuing change?" In order to throw light on the use of 'tradition' as a heuristic device, I shall review the 'chaine operatoire', to isolate some general characteristics of heuristic usage in archaeology.