Archaeology in Geography

It is uncommon for archaeology to be embedded in a Department of Geography. Typically, archaeology is considered one of four subfields of anthropology. This makes me wonder if people wonder, “Why is archaeology in geography at my university?” The answer to that question is largely historical, but today I would like to focus on what I think is a complementary fit. In the most basic sense, geography can be temporal, especially in longitudinal studies of economy, politics, culture, climate, landscape, et cetera. In addition, archaeology is quite often concerned with spatial patterns of landscape use, environmental variability, culture, site location, settlement patterns, and other similar variables. Basically, the phenomena of interest in archaeology and geography are quite similar, if not shared. Do these two fields study the same material, one field with a spatial focus, one with a temporal focus?

Let’s zoom in and look more closely. Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography is “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.” Formally titled ‘spatial dependence,’ this law is nearly identical to one of the three underlying “Principles of Archaeology.” It most closely relates to the Principle of Association framed in the 1800s by J. J. A. Worsae, which states that “materials close in space tend to be roughly the same age.” Assuming that an archaeological deposit is undisturbed, materials found close to one another are assumed to have been deposited roughly contemporaneously. Spatial heterogeneity a related geographic premise that variability in processes occur across space, is similar in logic to contingency and patterns of relatedness and difference through time.

Two other fundamental principles of archaeology, the Principle of Superposition and the Principle of Strata Identified by Fossils derive from geology—not so distant from geography. There are other ways that geography and archaeology overlap. For example, diffusion, or the movement of ideas, disease, technology from place to place is a common theoretical precept for explaining cultural similarity and dissimilarity across space and through time. Central place theory (CPT) is used in both disciplines to model the distribution of polities. In archaeology, CPT may reveal hierarchical distributions of related complexes of settlements that correspond to the distribution of resources and site size. Another common spatial tool used in archaeology is site catchment analysis, which assesses the resources available around past hamlets and villages. Very similar is “viewshed analysis,” which simply inquires as to features of landscape that are reliably visible given site location.

Analytically, both fields rely heavily on correlation for the purpose of assessing causes of spatial and temporal variability in phenomena. Correlation does not equal cause, but it is used as a tool to test hypotheses that relate to potential causes. Spatial and temporal autocorrelation, that observations along a continuum may be dependent on proximity though they are assumed to be independent, are essentially the same problem.  Both fields have deep affinities for mapping; in archaeology the scale of mapping ranges from intra-site data acquisition to settlement patterns on landscapes, to distributions of sites on continents. Need I point out the importance of maps in geography in more detail?!

So, why is archaeology usually housed in anthropology departments in the US? The fit within anthropology is also natural, but quite different. Anthropology by its very nature as the study of all things human incorporates archaeology within its subject matter. A strength of anthropology is its focus on culture as a means of adaptation. To be clear, culture is not only studied as an adaptive strategy, but this is one important focus. Culture as adaptation is a critical concept in archaeology, one I think that geography does not commonly share. This may be changing as ecological and evolutionary concepts become more familiar in geography.

Archaeology can provide an interesting temporal dimension to geography as the famous environmental archaeologist Karl Butzer has argued for decades. We have decided to make environmental archaeology one of the core areas of geography in our program. A premise of our program is that nearly all of the subject matter of archaeology has a spatial and temporal dimension, and the same can be said for geography. I challenge students who are interested in geography to take a class or two in archaeology. Let us know what you think of the fit!