I will try and give these areas of interest a cursory examination from the perspective of a chaologist, and suggest ways in which chaos could be used for the advancement of these various specialities. Obviously, chaos will not be a panacea, and there are parts of this breakdown that chaos has no immediately apparent relevance to, but so long as archaeologists can be educated into knowing that chaos is a tool available to be used, then we shall reap the benefits. It goes without saying that the vast majority, if not all, of human cultural activity is affected by the 'butterfly effect', tiny random events affecting the rest of human experience an entirely unpredictable amount. Our past is a fragile entity, if we were to run it again it would go very differently. Unfortunately there is little to be gained on a practical level from this, as it is nonsensical to consider rerunning our past.
Matters relating to subsistence are perhaps the most easy to approach using non-linear methods.
The technologies involved in the production of food will be dealt with later. The experience of dealing with the issues involved in this problem would enable a productive approach to be taken to the more complex and abstruse systems of information flow that are of such interest to archaeology. If we consider an idea as a self contained entity then it is possible to treat all different types of information spread in the same way, be it a technological innovation, or social practice. If we tie together the two preceding thoughts then we have a coherent picture of the advent and spread of ideas, and hence the bones for understanding which conditions are conducive to social change, and which are conducive to a relatively stable limit cycle or damped oscillator. As archaeologists we have traditionally spent a lot of our time working on typologies for sites, for artefacts and for cultures in general.