Chaos in Archaeology

1. What is chaos theory?

The word chaos conjurers up images of a maelstrom of formless, order-less motion, of discordant, random a-tonal musics. It has been defined as:

Chaos 1. the disordered formless matter supposed to have existed before the ordered universe 2. complete disorder; utter confusion.
(Collins 1995)

This concept emerged as an antithesis to the ordered, rational world developed in the minds of the great classical Greek thinkers. In early thought khaos was a silent, dark abyss from which all things came, it was the first entity (though it is not really possible to refer to "it" as it isn't really a thing), which gave birth to the first two 'things' in existence, Night and Erebus. Later khaos came to refer to the formless matter from which everything was created and from which our ordered universe emerged (from Infopedia 1995)

So how can we have a theory of chaos? Chaos is all about the unpredictable and the random, and theory means

1. a system of rules, procedures and assumptions used to produce a result . . .
5. a set of hypotheses related by logical or mathematical arguments to explain a wide variety of related phenomena in general terms
(Collins 1995).

These concepts would seem diametrically opposed, so at first glance the phrase 'chaos theory' is patently oxymoronic. But what if there are patterns to be found and trends to be seen in these apparent maelstroms of seemingly pure entropy? This idea is one of the basic concepts behind that which has come to be called 'chaos theory'.

Chaos (theory) is a branch of the study of non-linear systems; as opposed to the 'simple' linear systems that science has used virtually exclusively for hundred of years. Non-linear systems theory allows scientists to study systems other than the self-contained units, in which every influence is known and to which conventional mathematics is limited.

In my next section I shall deal with the emergence and development of chaos theory into the revolutionary set of concepts that it is today, I shall also give an overview of the ideas involved.