ABSTRACT
During the second half of the twentieth century ecological concepts permeated many fields of archaeological and anthropological enquiry, both implicitly and explicitly. Ecological modelling in environmental archaeology has a number of objectives, which apply to various scales of space, time and structural complexity. To the neoecologist and palaeoecologist, these problems might seem to make use of data from archaeological sites unacceptable for ecological modelling. The palaeoecological significance of some of these problems can be illustrated by citing an example from neoecology and exploring its potential significance for environmental archaeology. In terms of palaeoecological resolution, it would be even better to find a partially decayed oak log preserved in waterlogged deposits and to recover from it an assemblage of invertebrate animals. Models which require or assume ecological systems to be stable or equilibrium-seeking are increasingly being questioned and crticised both by neoecologists and palaeoecologists.
