0.3 Remixing çatalhöyük: archaeology at different scales

Archaeology at Different Scales

How do archaeologists weave far-reaching events with details of everyday life to create a rich approach to history?



How and why do archaeologists study Çatalhöyük at many different scales?

How can archaeologists use “multi-scalar data” to create comprehensive descriptions of place?

From galaxies to planets, from continents to cities, from people to atoms, the universe around us exists and changes over time at vastly different scales. People also interact and communicate with each other within different scales, and thus many anthropologists and archaeologists use a “multi-scalar” approach to study human culture.

Consider this example: Jose, born in Los Angeles, speaks English (national). He likes to watch Spanish telenovelas produced in Mexico and Argentina (ethnic), surfs the World Wide Web, and is concerned about global climate change (global). Elaborately decorated tiles remind him of his mothers’ cooking (family), and he greets his friends with a specific hand gesture (personal). All of these, and more, make up parts of Jose’s culture, and all of these things exist in different scales.

In archaeology, it is essential to observe and interpret a site at many different scales of resolution in order to reconstruct the past. Archaeologists have always made detailed observations of specific artifacts and finds. When archaeology was still a young science, however, the finds considered most important tended to be unique, exotic, elaborate, aesthetically pleasing, or chronologically diagnostic. Interpretation of these detailed observations was made at a very broad scale of resolution in terms of the Big Picture of history. This macro-scale approach defined cultural variation over large, often continental-wide, geographies, and took place over large swaths of time.

In the 1960s and 1970s, these analyses began to be broadened. Observations were made on statistically valid sets of artifacts from which variability was extrapolated at regional scales. The use of computers and other analytical and observational technologies increased the quantitative complexity with which archaeological data could be observed. Thus, a set of observations about a building at Çatalhöyük could “stand for” or “be typical of” all the buildings at the site, even those that had not yet been excavated, or the pattern of plant domestication observed at Çatalhöyük could be considered the model for the process of “neolithization” of all Anatolia. The focus here was more about regional, cultural ecology and cultural evolution, and understanding the relationships between culture and environment, than about the “noise” of the details of social practice.