Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology

TLDR

Assemblage research has expanded archaeology from matter’s morphogenetic capacities to community concepts, yet scholars have oscillated between grand processes and fleeting small-scale ethnography, and attempts to integrate scales have often relied on Annales‑influenced, linear, ontologically incompatible historical layers. The paper explores how assemblages can reconceptualize scale, with implications for the reality attributed to large-scale archaeological categories. The author uses assemblages to rethink the emergence and role of multiple scales in history, avoiding reduction of small-scale differences to epiphenomena or treating large-scale processes as mere reifications of daily life.

Abstract

The growing interest in assemblages has already opened up a number of important lines of enquiry in archaeology, from the morphogenetic capacities of matter through to a rethinking of the concept of community. In this paper I want to explore how assemblages allow us to reconceptualize the critical issue of scale. Archaeologists have vacillated between expending energy on the ‘great processes’ of change like the evolution of humanity, the colonization of the globe or the origins of agriculture, and focusing on the momentary, fleeting nature of a small-scale ethnographic present. Where archaeologists have attempted to integrate different scales the result has usually been to turn to Annales -influenced or time perspectivism-driven approaches and their fixed, linear and ontologically incompatible layers of history. In contrast, I will use assemblages to examine how we can rethink both the emergence of multiple scales and their role in history, without reducing the differences of the small-scale to an epiphenomenal outcome of larger events, or treating large-scale historical processes as mere reifications of the ‘real’ on-the-ground stuff of daily life. As we will see, this approach also has consequences for the particular kind of reality we accord to large-scale archaeological categories.