This article, however, retains the traditional term to avoid confusing the reader.
By setting up culture "circles," that is, various areas governed by the same or a dominant culture (in the view of the cultural-historical school) ethnology ceased to be either the unsystematic collecting of artifacts or the binding of disparate artifacts under the concept of evolutionism or unilinear development. Cultural historians also maintain that their method allows them to identify the differences between preliterate peoples, to characterize cultural phases, and to provide a concrete demonstration of the historical relationships between cultural phenomena, avoiding inadequately argued references to the a priori psychological unity of the human race.
From what has been stated above, it can be concluded, as Marvin Harris (1968) stresses, that from a cultural-historical perspective the culture circles are also strata or phases of a universal chronological plan (based upon the assumption that cultures should be placed in an evolutionary sequence according to the level of civilization attained). For many, this was what evolutionists had already done—construct a completely hypothetical history. The notion of the "cultural stratum" has a long history developed by authors such as Gian Battista Vico (1668–1744) and Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), who identified three Kulturstufen.
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