The authors of this paper met at Harvard University in July, 1955, to discuss the theoretical problems which arise in the study of culture contact situations in archaeology. The subject of contacts between cultures is one in which ethnologists have long been interested, and there is a substantial body of literature, both descriptive and theoretical, on contemporary and recent historic situations of this kind. Archaeological interest in the subject is somewhat more recent, but a few excellent reports on specific examples have appeared which we could use as a basis for our discussions. We believe that this paper is only the second attempt to contribute something to this field by generalization from archaeological data (Willeyl953).

The study of cultural stability requires a knowledge of cultural development over a reasonably long span of time. The definition of this time perspective is one of the major contributions of archaeology to the study of culture. The archaeologist therefore should be in a position to make a significant contribution to the appraisal of the stability problem itself. However, the lack of a commonly accepted anthropological definition of the concept of cultural stability imposes semantic difficulties which hinder the determination of practical limits for the stability- instability problem area. Moreover, the nature of the data available to the archaeologist conditions the kind of contribution he can make.

One of the seminar topics scheduled for the summer of 1955 by the Society for American Archaeology was “The American Southwest: A Problem in Cultural Isolation.” The assignment was to “… examine the assumption that these Southwestern cultures resulted from local acceptance and development of generalized and/or specific traits which can be isolated in distant cultural contexts at earlier times than their climactic developments can be observed in the Southwest.”

The classification of cultures into a workable number of types for descriptive or interpretative ends has occupied anthropologists since the science was born. Many kinds of data have been selected. Within the last decade Coon's (1948) subdivision of human societies into six levels on the basis of complexity of institutions, and the attempts by Strong (1948), Armillas (1948), Steward (1949), Willey and Phillips (1955) to distinguish developmental periods in the Mesoamerican and Andean archaeological sequences may be cited. Our excuse for attempting yet another formulation is that the current schemes emphasize either ethnographic criteria that are difficult or impossible to detect archaeologically, or unique features of particular cultural configurations rather than general criteria defining more universal patterns. Starting from a point of view different from those heretofore employed, we have tried to develop a classification of cultures that is usable with both ethnographical and archaeological data and that has functional and evolutionary as well as historical and descriptive significance.