Vienna school

The Vienna school of ethnology, also known as the Kulturkreislehre or culture-historical school, was an early 20th-century German approach to anthropology. Developed by ethnologists Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt, it posited that a limited number of cultural centers (Kulturkreise) originated and diffused ideas and technology across the globe. Proponents believed that all cultures resulted from the spread of traits from these centers, and a culture's history could be reconstructed by tracing these origins.123

Later anthropologists criticized this theory for overemphasizing diffusion and not accounting for independent invention, and for mistaking similar features for those with shared origins. By the mid-20th century, most anthropologists considered cultural phenomena too complex for this model to fully explain.1