As Binford has reminded us recently, our research should begin with the facts of the archaeological record and then move towards an interpretation of those facts (1983a). Our data are organised along the dimensions of time and space and predominantly by criteria of similarity and association. For European prehistorians from Childe to Clarke this organisation of the archaeological record has resulted in the creation of a hierarchy of entities, from attributes and types to assemblages, cultures, groups of cultures and technocomplexes (Childe 1956; Clarke 1968). As with all typological constructs, there has been debate over the utility and particularly the meaning of these entities. While north American scholars have concentrated attention on the validity of the type concept, European archaeologists have focused on the culture concept. Once the archaeological record had been organised into ‘cultures’, the interpretation of that record in terms of continuities and changes of ‘cultures’ could begin.

We have seen in chapter 2 that Iberian prehistoric cultures, like many others in Europe, were interpreted in a normative, ethnic framework. Recent debate has exposed the difficulties involved in this approach: it assumes that cultural similarity is a direct measure of human interaction; it obscures intra–cultural variability, for which an explanation is equally important; it involves methodological problems in defining cultural boundaries; and it assumes that the archaeological record is a ‘past tense’ of the ethnographic record.