The article addresses the significance of ethnological inspirations for archaeological reconstructions of prehistoric cultures. Sixty years later, Lewis Binford’s postulate to make archaeology “anthropology of the past” takes on new, unexpected meaning. In the past, archaeology was often seen as a “handicapped” discipline due to its limited use of ethnological data. Meanwhile, anthropology itself has undergone a massive transformation—the study of traditional (“primitive”) societies has been marginalised, and modern cultural anthropology now focuses on entirely different issues. Currently, an archaeologist would face a significant challenge in consulting the results of their research with cultural anthropologists. Anthropology is progressively losing its value as a source of cognitively significant solutions for archaeologists. Among ethnological approaches that are interested in the cultural past and offer theoretically mature proposals for archaeologists, structuralism and cultural semiotics remain. The main thesis of the article is that archaeology has already become the anthropology of primitive societies. Research into the past of these cultures will never disappear—at the very least, it will remain within the scope of archaeologists’ interests. They also face the challenge of independently constructing theories of primitive societies. If ethnology were to be of any assistance here, it would only be as a historical discipline, providing an archive of works produced during the classical era of its development.