Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Time-Averaged Deposits And Multi-Temporal Processes In The Wyoming Basin, Intermontane North America: A Preliminary Consideration Of Land Tenure In Terms Of Occupation Frequency And Integration., Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Archaeological time perspectivism encompasses the notion that archaeological deposits are formed through the operation of processes occurring at a variety of tempos over the short, medium, and long term (Bailey 1981, 1983, 1987, 2007, this volume). The processes involved may be behavioral, social, formational, organizational, or evolutionary, to name a few. Through their operation, material consequences may be immediate, lagged, or follow after some threshold is breached. Moreover, interaction may occur among and between different processes, depending on whether they operate at approximately the same scale (Bailey 1983; Fletcher 1995).

A corollary of the first statement is that different archaeological …

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; …

Artifact, Landscape, And Temporality In Eastern Mediterranean Archaeological Landscape Studies, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

Intensive survey over the last several decades has detailed an archaeological surface record in the Mediterranean that Cherry (1983:395, emphasis in original) describes as "likely to consist of a virtually continuous spatial distribution of material over the landscape, but a distribution extremely variable in density." In addition, geoarchaeological work, often coupled with survey, has demonstrated just how dynamic Mediterranean surfaces have been. Both of these field practices, intensive survey and geoarchaeology, were carried out in part to enable regional settlement pattern studies, to collect accurate, reliable, and precise data about past settlements and their location with respect to each other …

Solving The Puzzle Of The Archaeological Labyrinth: Time Perspectivism In Mediterranean Surface Archaeology, Luann Wandsnider

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This chapter critiques the currently embraced paradigm in Mediterranean surface archaeology of regional/settlement pattern studies – seated in flat-time functional metaphysic. As shown by Mediterranean archaeologists, that chronotype does not deal well with either complexity or history. And, attending methods, also as demonstrated by Mediterranean archaeologists, do not consistently accommodate or satisfactorily assign meaning to the varied archaeological landscape. But another formational metaphysic exists and seems better to comprehend the complex, historical world and to acknowledge landscape variation.This chapter argues for approaches to the Mediterranean landscape that accept and embrace a time perspectivism.