Timescales

Abstract

Archaeology prides itself on its long timescales. Despite the disadvantages of missing, fragmentary and dispersed evidence, archaeology has the one great advantage of looking at the longest of all longue durée, potentially spanning the last six million years. However, as we well know scale is context dependent - nothing is inherently big or small, but only by comparison to something else. Lying behind archaeology's claim to long timescales is an implicit and unexamined set of assumptions concerning what constitutes a general view of duration in other disciplines, which, when compared with archaeology, makes our timescales look big. What we might call short duration disciplines, such as anthropology or sociology, investigate sets of events or take a biographical view spanning a person's life time. History explores a range of timescales, overlapping at the micro end of the scale with anthropology, to the long durations of Braudel as people's relationships with land and sea unfolded over centuries and even millennia. By any of these standards, archaeological timescales appear generous, although of course we cannot compete with the geologists or palaeontologists, even though neither of these is worried about humans and their effects. Of the disciplines concerned with human action the span of millennia and millions of years available to archaeology dwarfs all others, allowing us to pose the big questions of what it means to be human, to get lost in the vastness of time at our disposal or dive into minute details of people's lives where these are preserved. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.