Using Statistical Physics to Understand Relational Space: A Case Study from Mediterranean Prehistory

Spatial relationships among entities across a range of scales are fundamental in many of the social sciences, not least in human geography, physical geography, and archaeology. However, space has received a surprisingly uneven treatment; in archaeology, for example, spatial analysis only really came to the fore in the 1960s and 70s, through the influence of the ‘New Geography’ (Haggett, 1965; Chorley & Haggett, 1967). David Clarke (1968, 1977), one of the principal exponents of spatial analysis in New Archaeology, described three levels of resolution in spatial archaeology: the micro level, the semi-micro or meso level and the macro level, the last of these representing relationships between sites (Clarke, 1977, p. 13). Yet, despite the clear implication that these levels should articulate, many subsequent studies have tended to aim at just one level. World-systems theory, for example, forms the basis for core-periphery models that examine macro-level spatial relationships (e.g., Schortman & Urban, 1992; Peregrine, 1996; McGuire, 1996; Chase-Dunn & Hall, 1997; Stein, 1998; Kardulias, 1999). While Clarke’s emphasis on different spatial scales has the advantage of clarity, his general approach, and indeed that of much spatial analysis of this kind, has been criticized for its overly deterministic approach to space. The idea that space has absolute geometric properties has been increasingly challenged by scholars arguing that space is a relative construct, a process that emerges out of social practices. In geography this critique already has a long history (e.g., Harvey, 1973), which has been taken up by increasingly diverse and influential voices (e.g., Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 1996; Soja, 1996; Thrift, 1996; Hetherington, 1997; Murdoch, 2006). This ‘spatial turn’ has also been experienced in archaeology, where approaches to space were ‘relationalized’ through the influence of phenomenology in landscape studies (Bender, 1993; Tilley, 1994; Knapp & Ashmore, 1999; Smith, 2003; Blake, 2002, 2004).

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