ABSTRACT
I would like to start by contrasting the nature of space and time as methodological issues in archaeology. It takes no serious reflection to discern a major disparity in archaeological control over space and time as they are traditionally understood, i.e. space and time as measures or dimensions of archaeological analysis. For archaeologists, space in this sense has never been problematic – we have always been able to measure the spatial parameters of, say, a site, using local or national grids, or, more recently, GPS. But time has not been so amenable. Despite the advent of radiocarbon dating since the 1950s, the temporal location of archaeological entities in an absolute framework (usually calendar years) remains fuzzy, and requires effort, expense and a suitable context that normally means that a single date, or a handful of dates, stand as proxies for a whole site or phase of a site – or even a whole artefact type. Moreover, excepting where historical dating can be used, our absolute dates may only be good to within half a century or so. Unlike spatial location, we cannot provide as tight a dating framework for anything we choose – both the degree of resolution of our methods and its applicability limit what we can do. This is not to be pessimistic about our dating techniques – the situation today is undoubtedly a staggering improvement on the situation half a century ago, and new techniques or refinements of old ones are constantly being made that only increase our ability to date our material. The point I would like to make is, rather, that dating is, and probably always will be, problematic compared to spatial location, because we do not have the same degree of control over its measurement.
