ABSTRACT
Archaeological sites consist essentially of activity areas and rubbish. That is where people have done things in the past and left some residue of having done something. This may have been a great 'something' like constructing Machu Picchu or Stonehenge, or a very minor 'something' like flaking a flint axe or eating a shellfish. Some activity areas, like a sacred rock, may involve no surviving residue other than the natural rock, so one can never be certain that it was an activity area. Unless there is clear oral tradition or documentary evidence that it was a sacred rock, then it cannot be considered an archaeological site, simply a site that could have been used. What we now see as archaeological sites are of course not intact activity areas. They have been changed through time. They are being changed during the life of the activity area, changed at the point of discard or abandonment and changed after discard. Archaeological sites are therefore transformed or changed activity areas and rubbish. The American scholar Michael Schiffer, among others, has been very influential in the consideration of the processes of transformation, and what follows is loosely based on much of his work (for example, Schiffer 1976 and Schiffer 1987) but consideration of transformation processes goes right back to Charles Darwin and his study of earthworm activity (Darwin 1881).
