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Cultural Spectrum and Metacultural Continuum
Cultures have varied widely over space and time. Processes of cultural differentiation in long-settled regions tend to lead to separation and drift of individual cultures. Processes of horizontal cultural transmission, or acculturation, are complex and tend to cross-cut and overlap with processes of intrinsic development. In spite of cultural conservativism, cultures can change fairly rapidly over time, and from century to century can take on entirely new profiles.
Cultural variation is therefore complex and the spectrum along which different ethnocultural groupings may be ranged can vary considerably depending on the criteria we specify--structural organization, economy, religion, kinship pattern, language, etc. It is difficult to specify simple criteria that would be universally applicable to all ethnocultural groupings, in all times and places, in a unidimensional comparative, nomothetic framework. A more accurate comparative framework would consist of complex, composite multidimensional axi of comparison, and would probably yield a kind of distribution that range between two sets of contraposed axis rather than on a single continuum.
The concept of the metacultural continuum derives from the idea of a cultural spectrum, and this is the notion that "culture" as that what is transmitted between peoples over time and space, would range within certain limits and possibly fall into a complex pattern of grouping. The notion of a meta-cultural continuum may prove more available in surveys of archaeological sites across regions and between regions, than in any especially contemporaneous survey of extant patterns of transmission.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
