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Temporal Scales And Archaeological Landscapes From The Eastern Desert Of Australia And Intermontane North America, Simon J. Holdaway, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Time gets much less attention than space in discussions of archaeological scale. This may seem strange in a primarily historical discipline for which the demonstration of human antiquity is something of a defining moment (Grayson, 1983). Part of the reason may lie in the nature of time. Time unfolds along a continuum, and the way observers perceive time depends on their location and the scales they adopt. Compare the contemporary Western experience of earth time, for example, with time at the scale of the universe. A person traveling at the speed of light would experience a different time (Hawking, 1998; …