‘구석기문화’라는 개념의 발생 과정과 그 효용성에 대하여

So-called “palaeolithic culture” has gained a great currency since its emergence as a semantic equivalence with the “civilization” in the 19th century. This article overviews the trajectory of its usage, transference and propagation in the context of the development of archaeological perspectives on the past humans’ materialistic evidences. It can be drawn that various theoretical tenets such as darwinian evolutionism, diffusionism, and phylogeny have contributed to the formulation of palaeolithic culture as a vague conceptual tool; some struggles for its integrative manifestation are exemplified by Childe’s “archaeological culture” and the “Mousterian Debates.” On the contrary, East Asian archaeology has been inherently dependent on the “culture” of transcendent meanings, biased by each county’s social evolutionism and nationalism which were highly valued as a zeitgeist of civilized modernization in the early 20th century. Three examples for those biased exploitation of the term “culture” are demonstrated by the works of Choi Namsun, Torii Ryuzo, and Jia Lanpo respectively. It is concluded that the use of the term “(Palaeolithic) culture” should be accompanied by strict awareness of its explicit meaning as the “materialistic entity resulting from patterned collective behaviors with chronological and temporal significance”; and that in Korean Palaeolithic research in particular, more rigorous consideration for using “culture” as a methodological unit should be ensured so that such an ambiguous culture-based nomenclature, the “pebble-tool cultural tradition” for example, need to be more conceptually redefined.