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The four paradigms being examined begin with Culture History. It emerged in the 1920’s and existed as late as the 1950’s. The goals of culture historians were to establish the age and connections between sites, to establish temporal and spatial frameworks which were usually based on the differing styles of artifacts. Some of the problems were that it was merely descriptive and not explanatory. The cultures were defined by the culture historians and did not necessarily represent the real people. It was just a classification made by the researcher and therefore prone to bias. Culture Historians presumed that a similar artifact types were the result of diffusion or migration, there was no such thing as independent thought. It could be summed up simply as the “when and where”. A useful example is the monument Great Zimbabwe where culture historians employed a diffusionist approach and credited the building of this monument to the Phonecians. To be fair, the wealthy British researcher Gertrude Caton-Thompson came to correct conclusion as early as 1931, that the creators were indeed local, however it was not until subsequent research was done later on that proved she was correct.
Culture historians argued that material culture is the manifestation, in material terms of a specific people. The people were given a name, usually after the place an item of pottery was first recognized. It was then usual to think in terms of folk migration to explain any observed changes in the pottery. If the migration argument did not seem to work, another approach was to look for features in the assemblages that have parallels in style, in distant lands. If parallels can be discovered, the tradionalist would argue that these were the origins or departure points, and were transmitted by cultural diffusion. Before the advent of carbon dating the parallels were used to date the pottery. Culture Historians found it difficult to explain abstract ideas such as religion. It was...