ABSTRACT
It is a commonplace that archaeology is concerned with the rubbish of past generations. Archaeologists study materials which have been discarded, abandoned or purposefully deposited by human beings at some time in the past. However, actual processes of deposition have rarely been central to the writing of prehistory. This has latterly been the case with attempts to problematise ‘the formation of the archaeological record’, which have generally involved the isolation of universal factors affecting or transforming archaeological materials. There has been a general failure to treat deposition as a social and cultural practice in itself. Schiffer (1972; 1976), for instance, distinguished between natural and cultural agencies which affect archaeological deposits, yet failed to see these ‘n-’ and ‘c-transformations’ as fundamentally different in their ontological status. Just as lawlike statements could be generated to predict and filter out the effects of rodent burrowing, water-sorting and transport, erosion, animal scavenging and trampling on deposits, structures and artefacts, so c-transforms were seen as universal laws governing the way in which human agency acted upon the archaeological record. Schiffer (1976, 15) gives as an example of one such law the prediction that, as settlement sites increase in size, so the distance between the use and discard locations of an artefact can be anticipated to increase.
