ABSTRACT
Archaeologists always have divided up the past into temporal blocks – periods, phases, ages; they are deployed at all scales, from the Three Age System to site specific chronologies. They have also been subject to various critiques over the years – and yet they remain with us. Indeed, arguably they still provide a dominant, albeit not the exclusive way to organize our archaeological data, temporally speaking. The aim of this contribution is to explore the idea of periodization in archaeology, review its usage, the objections against it and various alternatives – all framed within the larger question of the ontological commitments about time and (pre)history that periodization entails. The chapter will draw on the author’s recent work on a deeply stratified site in exploring these issues and present a concrete case study in how to develop other ways to think about the temporal structure of archaeological data.
