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| 2. Space |
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| We humans leave telltale clues about our behavior in the artifacts, abandoned houses, and food remains we leave behind us. The archaeologist studies the patternings of such finds—finds like a scatter of stone tools and animal bones at the site of a big-game kill 20,000 years ago. Such spatial analyses are based on another fundamental law, the Law of Association, which provides the second dimension of archaeological context. | 1 |
| The Law of Association states that an artifact is contemporary with the other objects found in the precise archaeological layer in which it is found. For instance, the mummy of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was associated with an astonishing array of household possessions and magnificent ceremonial objects. This association provided unique information on ancient Egyptian life in 1323 B.C.E. | 2 |
| Association is of great importance when studying prehistoric burials and changing artifact styles. The lavish ornaments and possessions buried with, say, Moche warrior-priests from coastal Peru give us invaluable information on social ranking in prehistoric societies. | 3 |
| Archaeologists also use associations of artifacts to study prehistoric human behavior. For example, a grindstone, some seeds, and a mortar lying where they were abandoned near a hearth can provide much information on women's activities in an early farming household. | 4 |
| In recent years, archaeologists have paid close attention to changing distributions of prehistoric sites on ancient landscapes, within well-defined regions like the basin of Mexico or coastal river valleys in Peru. In studying changing settlement patterns, they pay close attention to evidence for environmental change, distributions of plants and animals, people's economic practices, and changing technological skills. Perhaps the most remarkable study of this type comes from the basin of Mexico, where a team of archaeologists surveyed the entire highland region and chronicled changes in land usage over more than 3,000 years, right up to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec civilization in 1519–21 C.E. | 5 |
| The concepts of culture, time, and space in archaeology are inseparable, for, in the final analysis, archaeology is the study of the interrelations between the form of artifacts found in a site and their date and spatial location. The account of human prehistory which follows below is based on the two critical concepts of time and space that make up the archaeological context. | 6 |
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