ABSTRACT
In her celebration of the multiple modes of human communicating, the anthropologist Ruth Finnegan (2002) defines communication as a dynamic interactive process, made up of a variety of actions and experiences, created by active participants as they interconnect with and influence each other. Within this incessant, complex, and multisensory process, people draw on a wide array of bodily and environmental resources to communicate with others over space and time. These include sounds, smells, movements, touches, and sights, as well as the material things with which archaeologists are familiar. This perspective certainly highlights some of the limitations of the surviving archaeological evidence, but it should also encourage archaeologists to further develop theories of communication and to explore appropriate questions about the connections between people, places, and things over multiple scales and conceptions of space and time in the past.
