SPATIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

WENDY ASHMORE: the range of archaeological pursuits that focus on study of the spatial aspects of the archaeological record. These pursuits certainly do not constitute a separable "field," but, rather, a set of perspectives on studying ancient societies and cultures, emphasizing position, arrangement, and orientation, and examined at a range of scales: from individual buildings or monuments, caches, and burials, to settlements, landscapes, and regions. Architecture and the built environment, generally, are only a part of the whole, and discussion of them here highlights their two-dimensional aspects or plan view.

DAVID CLARKE: the retrieval of information from archaeological spatial relationships and the study of the spatial consequences of former hominid activity patterns within and between features and structures and their articulation within sites, site systems and their environments: the study of the flow and integration of activities within and between structures, sites and resource spaces from the micro to the semi-micro and macro scales of aggregation. [1977:9]

David Leonard Clarke (1937–76), Fellow at Peterhouse Colege, Cambridge; Analytical Archaeology (1967), Spatial Archaeology (1977); heaviliy influenced European archaeology in the 1970s. It demonstrated the importance of systems theory, quantification, and scientific reasoning in archaeology, and drew ecology, geography, and comparative anthropology firmly within the ambit of archaeology.

Spatial archaeology: based on ideas from new geography, and on tradition of german economic geography (Von Thuennen, A. Weber in W. Christaller).

For Clarke, the integrations and flows are mainly looked from the economic perspective and can be revealed by the locational analysis and spatial theories from economy, architecture, physics, stochastic analysis and anthropology. The major attractiveness of this approach was its potential for discivering PATTERNS (regular modes of behaviour) of economic human behaviour as spatially organized. Another advantage was its formal nature and language which enabled a series of quantitative and computer analyses.

An important base for such analyses was the underlying concept of human rational behaviour in decision-making processes. Human behaviour was considerd as the one that continually tends tended towards increased efficiency (MIN-MAX). All spatial structures are the products of non-random human decisions and are mirrored in repeated regularities. It is these regularities which are the principal study object of spatial archaeology.

Rationalist theories of space: economic, ecosystemic theories

Key words: geometry, , communication, distance, enthropy, energy,efficirncy ...

Clarke (1977, 9) defined 7 fundamental elements of spatial archaeology:

Raw materialsArtefactsBuilt structures (of any kind)Parts of built structures, Communication routesLocations of raw materialsHumans.

Relationships between the elements:

-Distributional logic

-Fluctuations in quantitative values

- hierarchical structures and internal fluctuations

-Other forms of ordered structures

ELEMENTS

OBSERVATIONS

3 levels: micro, semi-macro, macro levels

Theories: economic, architectural, anthropological, physics, statistics, stochastic

Major premisses: rational decision making, distance as friction, multiplier effect in hierarchy

Site catchment analysis

Latices model

Latices model

Thiessen polygons

Distributions: random, clustered, uniform

Nearest neighbour analysis

1. Measure all distances between the first neighbours.

2. Calculate observed mean distance between the neighbours(Dobs).

3. Calculate mean distance for random distribution:

A = area

N = number of measurements

4. Calculate nearest neighbour coeffiocient (Rn):

NAranD 5,0

NAranD 5,0

ran

obs

DD

nR

Hierarchical models:

- central places

-Human activities reflect ordered adaptation to distance-Locatinal decisions tend to minimize friction effect of distance-All locations equally accessible but some are more-Constant tendency towards economic efficiency-Human organization is essentially hierarchical-Settlement tends towards concentration (multiplier effetct)

Hierarchy: rank size rule 1)(1 nSSn

Rank-size rule

=

larger enthropy