The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c9.15

c9.15

While defining culture as the total way of life of a specific group of people, Ehrich comments, that "the archaeologists have become much more conscious of cultural dynamics and they have shown a constantly increasing tendency to restrict the use of the term 'Culture' to broader aspects of consistency in the ways of life of larger and larger units." Just as an ethnologist talks of the culture of a tribe or a village or a region, Ehrich³ justifies the archaeological discussion of the culture of a single site, or groups of sites or cemeteries, "provided such groups can be indentified as entities, if only by common aesthetic traditions as reflected in the relative degree of identity in their ceramic wares. So used, of course, the ceramics themselves form trait-complexes rather than cultures, but they do furnish criteria for isolating groups of people whose cultures can be discussed......Since archaeology deals with time-depth as well as spacial distribution, it seems admissible to use the term 'culture' to delineate differences between periods, as well as to express continuities of more general patterns in the way of life."