SPATIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

DAVID CLARKE: the retrieval of information from archaeological spatial

relationships and the study of the spatial consequences of former hominid activity
patterns within and between features and structures and their articulation within
sites, site systems and their environments: the study of the flow and integration of
activities within and between structures, sites and resource spaces from the micro
to the semi-micro and macro scales of aggregation. [1977:9]

WENDY ASHMORE: the range of archaeological pursuits that focus on study of the
spatial aspects of the archaeological record. These pursuits certainly do not
constitute a separable "field," but, rather, a set of perspectives on studying ancient
societies and cultures, emphasizing position, arrangement, and orientation, and
examined at a range of scales: from individual buildings or monuments, caches, and
burials, to settlements, landscapes, and regions. Architecture and the built
environment, generally, are only a part of the whole, and discussion of them here
highlights their two-dimensional aspects or plan view.

David Leonard Clarke (193776),

Fellow at Peterhouse Colege, Cambridge; Analytical Archaeology (1967),
Spatial Archaeology (1977); heaviliy influenced European archaeology in the
1970s. It demonstrated the importance of systems theory, quantification, and
scientific reasoning in archaeology, and drew ecology, geography, and
comparative anthropology firmly within the ambit of archaeology.

Spatial archaeology: based on ideas from new geography, and on tradition of

german economic geography (Von Thuennen, A. Weber in W. Christaller).
For Clarke, the integrations and flows are mainly looked from the economic
perspective and can be revealed by the locational analysis and spatial theories
from economy, architecture, physics, stochastic analysis and anthropology. The
major attractiveness of this approach was its potential for discivering PATTERNS
(regular modes of behaviour) of economic human behaviour as spatially
organized. Another advantage was its formal nature and language which
enabled a series of quantitative and computer analyses.
An important base for such analyses was the underlying concept of human rational
behaviour in decision-making processes. Human behaviour was considerd as
the one that continually tends tended towards increased efficiency (MIN-MAX).
All spatial structures are the products of non-random human decisions and are
mirrored in repeated regularities. It is these regularities which are the principal
study object of spatial archaeology.

Rationalist theories of space: economic, ecosystemic theories

Key words: geometry, ,

communication, distance,
enthropy, energy,
efficirncy ...

Clarke (1977, 9) defined 7 fundamental elements of

spatial archaeology:
OBSERVATIONS
Relationships between the
elements:

ELEMENTS
Raw materials
Artefacts
Built structures (of any kind)
Parts of built structures,
Communication routes
Locations of raw materials
Humans.

-Distributional logic
-Fluctuations in quantitative
values
- hierarchical structures and
internal fluctuations
-Other forms of ordered
structures

3 levels: micro, semi-macro, macro levels

Theories:

economic, architectural, anthropological, physics, statistics,

stochastic

Major premisses: rational decision making, distance as friction, multiplier effect in

hierarchy

Site catchment analysis

Latices model

Latices model

Thiessen
polygons

Distributions: random, clustered, uniform

Nearest neighbour
analysis
1. Measure all distances
between the first
neighbours.
2. Calculate observed
mean distance between
the neighbours(Dobs).

Dran 0,5

3. Calculate mean distance

for random distribution:
N

Dran 0,5

A=

area

N=

number of
measurements

4. Calculate nearest
neighbour coeffiocient
(Rn):

Rn

Dobs
Dran

Hierarchical models:
- central places

-Human activities reflect ordered adaptation to distance

-Locatinal decisions tend to minimize friction effect of
distance
-All locations equally accessible but some are more
-Constant tendency towards economic efficiency
-Human organization is essentially hierarchical
-Settlement tends towards concentration (multiplier
effetct)

Hierarchy: rank size rule

Sn S 1(n) 1

Rank-size
rule
=
larger
enthropy