ABSTRACT
Change may be constant, but we only recognize it when it happens because of the things that don’t change. When a car drives past stationary road signs, when your children outgrow their clothes, when your friends have bought a new flatscreen TV for their living room. We notice when something is different, but only insofar as most of the time, most things around us stay the same. If everything was changing all the time, the world would be chaos. Yet for archaeologists, change has a rather different character. Changes in deposition or in assemblage composition involve interpreting spatial or material variation in temporal terms, as discussed at the end of the last chapter. In these instances, change is perceived not so much against a backdrop of continuity as against an adjacent, that is, previous state of affairs. The best analogy in everyday life is when the change observed is not against a frame of continuity but rather against what came before. When that new flatscreen is not seen as a subtle change to the appearance of an otherwise unchanged living room, but as a replacement for the previous television. This kind of change – let us call it succession – is the kind that is often most prevalent in archaeological descriptions of change; where one type of artefact replaces or succeeds another, one layer is superimposed on another.
