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Hence a synthesis such as Gordon Childe’s The Dawn of European Civilisation went through six editions between 1925 and 1957. This reflects the culture history view that new data, rather than new frameworks, are the most important aspect in the development of archaeology. The framework allows the data to ‘speak for themselves’ and what they tell the ‘listening’ archaeologist is when change took place and from what direction it came. Very often any further interpretation is regarded as speculation and if it occurs it will only be found hidden away in the closing remarks rather than the body of the report.

More importantly, this approach questions the one-way interpretation of the scientist by contrasting it with a double hermeneutic – an exercise in translation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, subject and object. We move from our frame of meaning, which could be scientific, to that of the people being studied. Rather than imposing our view of how their world worked, we have instead a dialogue of difference. But what exactly the frame of reference of someone in the Bronze Age might be remains a problem (see Gosden 1994).

On a world scale culture history also accounts for what the majority of archaeologists think they are doing. For example, Paddayya (1995: 138), writing of Indian archaeologists, concludes that most of them are at best disinterested in theory and regard the discipline primarily as a fact-gathering enterprise. The French archaeologist Paul Courbin is vehemently anti-theoretical, stating that the goal is the establishment of facts and nothing more (1988: 112). Such statements should not imply that culture history is entirely without any concepts or theories (see Taylor 1948) but rather that its practitioners emphasise the primacy of data, facts and classification.