Time, process, and structured transformation in archaeology

Is 'chaos theory' relevant to archaeology? In a discipline which essentially studies how human beings came to be, it is remarkable that there are hardly any conceptual tools to describe change. The western intellectual and scientific tradition has for a long time favoured mechanics over dynamics, and the study of stability, over that of change. In the case of archaeology, change has been primarily viewed in terms of external climatic and 'environmental' events. Revolutionary innovations in the natural and life sciences, often erroneously referred to as 'chaos theory', suggest that there are ways to overcome this problem. A wide range of processes can be described in terms of these dynamical systems, and modern computing methods enable us to investigate many of their properties. This volume presents a cogent argument for the use of such approaches, and a discussion of a number of its aspects, by a range of scientists from the humanities, social and natural sciences, and archaeology.