ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that the discipline of archaeology should replace its traditional concept of culture with one that focuses on the contingency and openness of cultural and historical change. Human communities do not live in isolation, but always perceive themselves as part of a wider world with which they interact. Archaeology then must take an explicitly transcultural perspective – one that transcends the notion of cultures as bounded units of investigation and analyses the results of processes of transculturation during which new knowledge, practices and material forms are generated through encounters and contacts (Juneja 2011; Juneja and Falser 2013). Such a perspective exchanges the customary model of diffusion for one of translation (Latour 1986: 266–9) in which knowledge and material forms received from the outside are constantly modified and adapted to different contexts.