This paper is an attempt to make a synthesis between archaeology (with a specific concentration on social change) and the newly emerging science of chaos theory.
The first chapter is a history of scientific chaos, also dealing with the principles that make up the discipline, with frequent applications of the principles to archaeological examples. Attention has been paid to the way in which chaos has led to a paradigm shift in the hard science.
A review follows of the keystone texts in the field of chaos, and also the scant literature dealing with chaos with reference to the social sciences. The main interests of archaeology are then addressed, and possible applications of chaos to these are suggested. The penultimate section deals with the problems involved in this synthesis. To conclude I discuss possible directions in which archaeology might move if it embraces chaos, and reasons for doing so.
To my late grandmother, Monica, fondly remembered.
Thankyou to my family, Miriam, Sandy, Ute and all those who helped and encouraged me. Also many thanks to those on Arch-theory and Arch-L who started the ball rolling, and to a million butterflies for making this possible.
Before you begin reading this piece of work, I feel that it would be a good idea to explain what inspired me to choose this particular subject for my dissertation.
My interest in chaos theory began in my 'A' level maths lessons, where my maths teacher dropped tantalising hints about fractals and non-linearity, but she was too busy trying to teach me how to integrate the square root of minus one to spend any time on it.
Due to the scientific nature of the education I had before university I have sympathies with many aspects of the processual movement in archaeology, but as Lampeter is a centre for anti-processual thought I have been made well aware of its failings by my lecturers.
In the summer of 1996 I came across the book 'Chaos' by James Gleick, and as I read it so many things fell into place; I saw the possibility of solutions for so many of the problems that beset the processual movement, and many other roads of enquiry. I assumed that others must have noticed the potential that these new(-ish) theories offered archaeology, but given a little research I found remarkably little evidence of this. Discussions which I began on Arch-theory and Arch-l list-servers provided me with confirmation that very little had been written, but that there was some interest from the archaeologists in the discussion groups. When it came to the time that we were to begin our dissertations, I decided to make my contribution to the archaeological body of thought by examining what insights we might gain from the application of chaos theory to our field.
© Joe MacLeod-Iredale 1998