Intensive Scales and Virtual Archaeology
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-02-02

Archaeology has long made a virtue of its capacity to operate at multiple scales, studying everything from the digging of an individual pit through to epochs of human evolution. Our ability to write newly specific narratives about particular sequences of history, through the application of Bayesian modelling, both enhances and challenges how we work at these different levels. In this paper I want to explore how the construction of more detailed narratives might be enhanced through combination with particular theories within the ‘ontological turn’. These offer, I would argue, equally significant challenges to how we think about the interactions of historical scale in archaeology (cf. Harris 2017). Rather than ‘rival claims’, to quote the session abstract, I will suggest that there is nothing necessarily incompatible about these approaches. Just as multiple series of Bayesian analyses both create newly detailed histories and allow us to build up larger scale narratives (e.g. Whittle et al. 2011), so rethinking the ontological foundations of what we mean by scale can open up new ways of thinking about the particular, as well as the general. 

Oliver Harris (University of Leicester)