Space, Place, and Architecture: A Major Meeting Point between Social Archaeology and Anthropology?

Space and the built forms of it are increasingly recognized as fundamental in social analysis and theoretical discourse across the social sciences. This chapter explores, from an archaeological perspective, whether space can provide a meaningful framework for effective interaction between anthropology and archaeology. It presents an up-to-date account of recent developments and topical themes in the archaeology and anthropology of space, evaluating disciplinary contributions and raising issues, consequences, and implications critical to a closer relationship. The chapter discusses ways that relations between archaeology and anthropology may work out in the future. It is primarily concerned with what anthropology can learn from archaeology or from areas of archaeological thought it might have not drawn inspiration from as yet. But it also shows the specific ways in which archaeology has already learned from anthropology. In archaeology the earliest and most sustained outside influences come from geography and, to a lesser extent, from the anthropologist Julian Steward’s “cultural ecology”.