The historical interplay between societies is governed by many factors, including in particular the spreading of languages, religion, and other symbolic traits. Cultural development, in turn, is coupled to the emergence and maintenance of information spreading. Strong centralized cultures exist due to attention from their members, whose faithfulness in turn relies on the supply of information. Here we discuss a culture evolution model on a planar geometry that takes into account aspects of the feedback between information spreading and its maintenance. Features of the model are highlighted by comparing it to cultural spreading in ancient and medieval Europe, where it suggests in particular that long-lived centers should be located in geographically remote regions.