20th March 2014, 12:23 AM
(a good thread - time to post)
remember that Harris is not ~God (:0) and derives from older traditions in geology - where the canvas has not only been flipped, torn, stuck back together, flipped again, folded, had parts of another completely differnt picture punched through it, but then baked in magma for a few million years....
the key assumption is that fragmneted units retain enough integrity to be objectively/rationaly 're-assembled' into a sequence (or at least sufficently enough to propose a hypothesis, or to plan a transect/bore)....but this is not always the case, especialy in the lithosphere-biosphere interaction zone (where archaeologists most commonly reside)
one thing Harris-type Matrix is very bad at is pedology, drift geomorphology, concepts of equifinality, and generally all things Soil.
I can not begin/be bothered to count the number of times i have seen spurious 'stratigraphic' relationships made because "there HAS to be a sequence" - when infact the evidence is equivocal at best.
It is difficult at first to operate in the context of equifinal data - it is a strange and somewhat parralel world, when it must accpeted as a matter of methodological fact more than one process/event/factor could lead to evidence/data that apperas identical to us today....but, after all, how certian could we ever be, and, fundementally, about what?
remember that Harris is not ~God (:0) and derives from older traditions in geology - where the canvas has not only been flipped, torn, stuck back together, flipped again, folded, had parts of another completely differnt picture punched through it, but then baked in magma for a few million years....
the key assumption is that fragmneted units retain enough integrity to be objectively/rationaly 're-assembled' into a sequence (or at least sufficently enough to propose a hypothesis, or to plan a transect/bore)....but this is not always the case, especialy in the lithosphere-biosphere interaction zone (where archaeologists most commonly reside)
one thing Harris-type Matrix is very bad at is pedology, drift geomorphology, concepts of equifinality, and generally all things Soil.
I can not begin/be bothered to count the number of times i have seen spurious 'stratigraphic' relationships made because "there HAS to be a sequence" - when infact the evidence is equivocal at best.
It is difficult at first to operate in the context of equifinal data - it is a strange and somewhat parralel world, when it must accpeted as a matter of methodological fact more than one process/event/factor could lead to evidence/data that apperas identical to us today....but, after all, how certian could we ever be, and, fundementally, about what?