Abstract
Thirty years ago, a seminal volume drew together leaders in the field who were working on quantifying diversity in archaeological assemblages, Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology (Leonard and Jones, eds. 1989). While several papers identified space as a critical factor in structuring diversity, this concept was largely unaddressed and the analyses presented remained intrasite in scope. This was certainly due, in part, to the analytic and conceptual limitations of spatial analysis in archaeology in the late 1980s. Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology came out just before the geospatial revolution hit full swing in the field and the capabilities of today’s geospatial technologies were unimaginable at the time. Now, thirty years later, the desire to analyze diversity across multiple sites from entire regions is easy to realize computationally. Nevertheless, key challenges identified in the original volume about quantifying diversity persist. While one can measure variation to identify diversity, we still need to understand what that means and how the categories we use to compute diversity are related to actual variation in past behavior(s) of interest. We explore various geospatial approaches that can help untether diversity analyses from traditional site-based frameworks. We argue that centering the experiences of the people producing and, importantly, perceiving the variation extant in their landscape is essential, as these personal experiences structured the past diversity we aim to study.
Highlights
Thirty years ago, a seminal volume on diversity measures in archaeology came out, Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology (Leonard and Jones, eds. 1989)
The fact that archaeological settings have a great variety of material remains was recognized early in the development of the discipline, but this volume reflected a shift in archaeology towards a serious search for the best ways to rigorously characterize archaeological variation and the statistical properties of archaeological assemblages (Jones and Leonard 1989: 1)
4 Concluding Thoughts In the above examples, we describe various ways in which investigations of archaeological diversity can begin to unbind itself from site-based, alpha measures and scale up – or zoom out as the case may be – to statistics derived from a much broader, encompassing, and illustrative scope
Summary
A seminal volume on diversity measures in archaeology came out, Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology (Leonard and Jones, eds. 1989). A seminal volume on diversity measures in archaeology came out, Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology The fact that archaeological settings have a great variety of material remains was recognized early in the development of the discipline, but this volume reflected a shift in archaeology towards a serious search for the best ways to rigorously characterize archaeological variation and the statistical properties of archaeological assemblages (Jones and Leonard 1989: 1). We contend that analyses of diversity must not be confined only to alpha or intrasite measures, focused on diversity within assemblages or sites, and we explore how geospatial technologies can be harnessed to broaden our analytical sights to include investigations of diversity at increasingly larger spatial scales, such as that of beta or intersite diversity and gamma or region-wide or totallandscape diversity
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