By investigating the emergence, maintenance and transformation of sociocultural systems, Archaeology basically works with three closely inter-related dimensions: space, time, and form. The latter has seen the greatest diversity in approaches over the course of Archaeology's construction as a discipline. This article presents the conceptions of material culture developed by various schools of archaeological thought. Wrongly understood until the 1980s as an unproblematic dimension, a passive reflection of human behavior, some authors since then have explored its active and transformative role in social negotiations, making it the concrete dimension of relations inside the society.
Material culture; Archaeology; Archaeological theory