Confronting Scale in Archaeology ― Issues of Theory And Practice

Archaeologists from North America, Europe, and Australia grapple with the concept of scale and its intentional and unintentional influence in their practice. The fundamental problem is that archaeologists, being human, have trouble imagining things very much larger or very much smaller than humans, and things very much longer or very much shorter than a human lifetime. The contributions look at space, time, and size in the past and the present; problems of scale and their identification; and new methodologies and understandings for interpreting scale. The 16 papers are based loosely on a session at the 2000 Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting at Oxford University. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)