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228 | Martin Furholt

The increased availability of database Systems and statistical pro-cedures (Shennan 1997), together with Geographical Information Systems (GIS; Burrough/McDonnell 1998) allow for the assessment and Processing of the large and ever-increasing amounts of archaeological data that have been collected all over the world. Using these systems, instead of talking about cultures, we can register the stylistic traits of each artefact, geo-reference it, datę it and compare it to every other artefact available. This is, of course, a theoretical statement, but it be-comes realistic when proper sampling strategies are implemented (Or-ton 2000). Comparable and inspiring approaches have been carried out in the central European Iron Age (Muller-Scheessel/Burmeister 2006; Nakoinz/Steffen 2008).

It should be clearly stated that such a quantitative approach to stylistic variation in materiał culture does not provide a morę objective assessment of cultural patterning than the traditional, non-quantita-tive ones. It is, of course, no morę than a procedurę to formalise our evidence and to compare our data (excavated, processed and pub-lished and thus subjected to a series of subjective filters). The formal-isation makes the data comparable, and the quantification allows us to go beyond absolute statements like “site a is similar to site B, but very different from site C”. Indeed, it provides us with the possibility to express how similar sites a B are, and how marked the differences are compared to site C (see fig. 1). Nevertheless, as a discipline of the humanities, we have to use theories and build plausible models that must be confronted with empiric data.

Similarities in a Polythetic culture model

In a cultural communication model these similarities in style may be interpreted as equivalent to the cultural proximity between the different producers of the objects, a proximity that will indicate the level of communication between these persons. In a culture-theoretical per-spective, such communication does not take place in one single realm of a coherent culture. Instead it is connected to different cultural col-lectives, which show different ranges and overlap, as every individual is involved in several different collectives due to different social roles he/she is engaged in (see Hansen 2003). These cultural collectives can be viewed as connected to spheres of cultural communication that have