Archaeological Spatial Analysis

A Methodological Guide

Mark Gillings, Piraye Hacıgüzeller, Gary Lock, Mark Gillings, Piraye Hacıgüzeller, Gary Lock

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351243834
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Archäologie

Effective spatial analysis is an essential element of archaeological research; this book is a unique guide to choosing the appropriate technique, applying it correctly and understanding its implications both theoretically and practically.

Focusing upon the key techniques used in archaeological spatial analysis, this book provides the authoritative, yet accessible, methodological guide to the subject which has thus far been missing from the corpus. Each chapter tackles a specific technique or application area and follows a clear and coherent structure. First is a richly referenced introduction to the particular technique, followed by a detailed description of the methodology, then an archaeological case study to illustrate the application of the technique, and conclusions that point to the implications and potential of the technique within archaeology.

The book is designed to function as the main textbook for archaeological spatial analysis courses at undergraduate and post-graduate level, while its user-friendly structure makes it also suitable for self-learning by archaeology students as well as researchers and professionals.

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ARCHAEOLOGY AND SPATIAL ANALYSIS

Mark Gillings, Piraye Hacıgüzeller and Gary Lock

Part 1 – archaeology and space

This book comprises twenty-three detailed chapters describing key spatial analytical techniques and their application to archaeology. As the title of the book suggests the focus is on methodology, and the chapters herein cover a range of techniques, both established and emerging. Although the emphasis is on practice – the how to do it – it is crucial to stress from the very start that underlying any application of these techniques must be the why we do it. Each chapter in the volume offers an introduction covering the background of that particular technique. Here we present some thoughts on the development of ‘spatial archaeology’ more generally and why we think it is fundamental to much of what we do as practicing archaeologists.

We start by considering the centrality of space to everyday life and archaeology as a discipline, and open up this discussion further by laying out some of the relations that archaeological space finds itself entangled with, such as time, practice and representation. Following this, we offer a brief historical overview of the development of spatial analysis in archaeology. This explores the contribution of the early antiquarians, through the formulation and zenith of formal spatial techniques in the late 1950s to early 1980s, their fall from favour and then second coming in the 1990s due to the introduction of a range of spatial technologies, not least Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This is then followed by a consideration of why concepts of space and spatiality underlie much archaeological thought, what can be called ‘spatial thinking’ in archaeology, and how this relates to what is understood by ‘spatial analysis’. The chapter concludes with a careful consideration of what it means to think spatially in order to foreground the goal of the volume as a whole, which is to make a positive contribution to the on-going development of archaeological spatial literacy at a time of significant theoretical and methodological transformation.

Being human embodies space and spatial relationships within a material world and just as this applied to people living in the past, so it applies to those of us concerned with trying to understand those past lives through their remaining material residues. Most, if not all, archaeological material has a spatial component and it is not surprising, therefore, that spatial thinking and spatial analysis has been a central archaeological endeavour since the beginnings of the discipline. While some other social sciences and humanities disciplines, particularly history, have claimed a fairly recent ‘spatial turn’ (Bodenhamer, Corrigan, & Harris, 2010; Warf & Arias, 2009), archaeology in all its changing forms has always incorporated an implicit or explicit acceptance that space and spatial relationships are a fundamental part of ‘doing archaeology’. It has also been highly proactive in co-opting and developing the methodological tools needed to explore this spatiality, culminating in the rich variety of approaches available to us today; a consequence of developments in theory and practice alongside changing analytical and technological opportunities.

In fact, space, spatiality and spatial awareness are such fundamental parts of being human that we often take them for granted at the bodily level of moving through and experiencing the world. Developments in digital geospatial technology and the increasingly pervasive presence of locational media have increased this familiarity only further (see Wood, 2012, p. 280). It is this very familiarity that risks blinding us to the spatial formations of social life and to how we actively manipulate space and spatial relationships to shape the world around us through the activities, behaviours and structures that give our lives meaning. These spatial manipulations and interventions are what make us distinctive and different to other cultural groups, offering both social cohesion and social exclusion at the same time. This assumption of essential human spatiality is what underlies much traditional ‘spatial archaeology’ – the isolation and interpretation of spatial patterns within archaeological evidence that relate archaeological activity in the present to the generative processes in the past that we are interested in.

But what are some of the complex relations that describe archaeological space and spatialities? Through which relations are we able to ‘do’ spatial archaeology and interpret human-space interactions in the past? We briefly lay out five of them here. For one, space in archaeology is linked to time (see Taylor, this volume). Prior to the mid-20th century, cultural evolutionary and cultural historical approaches in archaeology explicitly privileged time over space working with long time scales, and grand themes and trends (see Trigger, 1998), echoing a modernist discursive practice (Roberts, 2012, p. 14). Yet, arguably, archaeologists realised relatively early on that notions of space and notions of time were intimately linked and these were often treated as tacit conceptual axes along which analyses and interpretations were structured, often alongside a further axis such as ‘form’ (Spaulding, 1960) sociality and the social (Soja, 1996) and materials and material relations (Conneller, 2011; Lucas, 2012, pp. 167–168).

Secondly, space in archaeology is about mobility, rendering movement across space a key focus of archaeological and anthropological inquiry (e.g. Hammer, 2014; Richards-Rissetto & Landau, 2014; Snead, Erickson, & Darling, 2009; cf. Verhagen, Nuninger, & Groenhuijzen, 2019). Regardless of its context and spatial scale, traversing space affords imaginations about what is to come, reflections on what is left behind and memories of places. As such, it connects time and space with living. After all, human life is a temporal process that unfolds with the formation of places through movement and through the material and immaterial traces that movement leaves behind (Ingold, 1993; see Atkinson & Duffy, 2019; McCormack, 2008). Yet how can a preoccupation with spatial movement and all of the terms that come with it (e.g. flows, networks and liquidity, often used to describe and analyse conditions of late capitalism, and to construct sweeping grand narratives of globalisation) give hope to archaeologists trying to come to terms with “specific, tangible materialities of particular times and places” (Dalakoglou & Harvey, 2012, p. 459)? It appears that thinking through space with movement is a rather different approach than looking at movement to observe and describe space: while the latter involves an examination of selected outcomes including spatial patterns in order to trace antecedent causes, the first attempts to follow forward moment-to-moment spatial formations intently (see Ingold, 2011, pp. 6–7; Knappett, 2011).

Thirdly, space in archaeology is about stories and daily practices (such as practices of gathering, composition, alignment and reuse) that typically form spatial assemblages with archaeologically traceable material dimensions (McFarlane, 2011, p. 649; see Seigworth, 2000; Thrift, 2008). The iterative processes of creating these assemblages and relations are in fact processes of place-making, processes of dwelling. They involve assembling relations between humans, non-humans, materials, immaterials, and animate and inanimate things that continually produce the character and history of places (see also McFarlane, 2011). Places come about then through routine repetition “that is permeated by the past and the present, and oriented toward the future” (Resina & Wulf, 2019, p. vii); they come about through enactment and performance of relations anew almost daily. What about telling and re-telling engaging qualitative and quantitative archaeological stories about these places? They can be considered as just another act of re-performing spatial relations that re-assemble archaeological places in the present.

Fourthly, space in archaeology is as much about absences as about presences. Archaeological formation processes often hinder us from asking certain questions about spatialities as spatial relations between things or things themselves can be absent from the archaeological contexts in question. Often, archaeologists also lack an adequate appreciation of what is actually missing. Since such uncertainties are endemic to archaeology, archaeological practices involve and remain open to new ways of incorporating them within archaeological writing and analysis about space. Nonetheless, the presence of materials remain almost exclusively the single origin of signification and meaning in archaeological contexts. What about ‘archaeologically empty spaces’, i.e. spaces devoid of materials that can be directly associated with past human activities? As Löwenborg (2018, p. 37) stresses “[a]n archaeologist should not assume that ‘emptiness’ is a random prehistoric phenomenon. The saying ‘the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence’ certainly applies to archaeology”. As such, ‘empty spaces’ in archaeology should be subject to description, representation and interpretation as much as any other archaeological space. Their status in archaeology today is in fact an effect of common signification and meaning-making practices in the discipline. That is, there is nothing inherently meaningful or meaningless about ‘empty spaces’ but just how we do archaeology today.

Finally, space in archaeology is about the challenges of representing it and increasingly so in the digital age. As discussed in Lefebvre’s (1991, p. 38) detailed treatment of space, “representations of space” form one of the three fundamentals that structure spatial understanding. Lefebvre conceptualizes “representations of space” as the space of planners, scientists and engineers who attempt to identify “spatial practice” and “representational spaces” with it. In archaeology, it is through the process of engaging with evidence that we conceive representations of space, i.e. the interpretative constructs of the excavation plans, distribution maps and spatial models used to represent and explain spatial and social relationships. At the same time it is through these representations of space that we attempt to link past spatial practices with Lefebvre’s “representational spaces”, i.e. the lived spaces of past people. Put differently, representing space in archaeology is a generative act, a process of constructing how archaeologists get to know, experience, understand and deal with space. And as post-representational cartography has made clear, every engagement with representations of space (such as ‘using’ maps) re-creates those representations as well as the spaces that are represented (Hacıgüzeller, 2017). As such, creating representations of space via GIS or any other tool, and using them in archaeology are not simple acts; they are processes with great consequences that need to be identified and talked about (Wood, 2010).

Part 2 – towards spatial archaeology

To understand the current status of spatial analysis in archaeological research, it is important to consider, albeit briefly, its disciplinary development. In the overview that follows we focus mainly on British developments from 16th century antiquarianism to the development of archaeology as a discipline towards the end of the 19th and through the 20th centuries. Related to this, although with important differences, is North American archaeology, which is touched upon here but described in detail by Willey and Sabloff (1993). Within the range of wider geographical and cultural contexts, we readily acknowledge that the history of archaeology is a complex international one which must incorporate many different national traditions (Schnapp, 1996; Boast, 2009). As a result, what we offer here is undoubtedly partial and selective.

We start at the very birth of the discipline, because some of the core themes that shape current spatial research in archaeology had their origins in the very first phases of archaeological enquiry; not least the tensions that exist between empiricism and synthesis. For archaeology to become an evidence-based discipline it needed not just quantities of evidence but for that information to be structured, ordered, catalogued and made accessible. Increasing amounts of evidence require effective synthesis and interpretation in order to produce narratives which provide an understanding of the past. Other key themes that have been woven into them have concerned the relationship between space and time and the representation and reasoning of change through time and across space. Another important element is that of scale – at its simplest level the details of and associations between artefacts, sites and landscape. The interacting scales of empiricism and synthesis range from the details of artefacts to enable typologies and dating, to the recording of sites, landscapes and broad geographical regions.

A defining characteristic of archaeology, and of much antiquarian activity, is what we can broadly call fieldwork. Whether this is investigating the small-scale relationships available through excavation or the larger views offered by landscape, the physical remains of the past have demanded an appreciation of spatial relationships explained through reasoning and representation. Those early explorers of the past established methods of recording that have formed the basis for more recent methodologies, some of which are still central to the writing of archaeology today, a good example being distribution maps (Wickstead, 2019). Similarly the recording of excavations through plans and sections, and the later incorporation of stratigraphical relationships, have provided the basis for spatial thinking at that scale since the early days of the discipline.

In 1533 John Leland was commissioned to travel the kingdom to “make a search for England’s Antiquities” and record the “places wherein Records, Writings and secrets of Antiquity were reposed” (Chandler, 1993). His recording of historical documents, artefacts and places were assembled into his ‘Itinerary’, a large collection of notes, that offered a remarkable account of his nine years of travelling the land with the intention of producing ‘a map’ of Great Britain. The importance of Leland’s contribution in terms of methodology is that he escaped from the library and went on the road. Although claimed as the ‘father of English topography’ Leland’s itinerary is in fact a ‘map in words’ for it contains very few graphical representations and he never produced a map as originally intended. Spatial relationships between towns, villages, archaeological sites and other points of interest are described in his notes by measurements of distance and compass directions.

The next great work of English antiquarianism, William Camden’s Britannia, first published in Latin in 1586, was in many ways the realisation of Leland’s dream (Schnapp, 1996, p. 141). Even with the addition of over 50 maps, however, the Britannia is still primarily a work of narrative, where text incorporates spatial descriptions and understandings and the maps provide mainly a reference for location. For Schnapp (1996, p. 154), Camden typified the British interest in archaeological cartography, the “description of landscape and listing of monuments”. For the beginnings of spatial archaeology in the modern sense of recording, repres...