Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Variability: A Reassessment of Its Meaning, Afforded Range, and the Relation to Process" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Interpretations of emerged variability in the paleo-archaeological record often presuppose a plurality within the underlying process, be that process related to demography, cultural transmission, or a landscape-use behavior. We take by default the differences in, for example, frequencies of the same artifact attributes and faunal elements between sampled locations to represent different social groups and place uses. Calls for attention to the emergence of variability have already been made (e.g., G. Isaac’s “random walk patterning”), but the prevailing practice of regarding data as central tendencies themselves is ignoring the likelihood that, in the simplest terms, a single operating process can result in a broad range of variability or, conversely, that the same or limited variability can be the result of a number of different processes. The aim of this session is to reassess the meaning of emerged variability and its relation to a process or to interaction of processes. We will discuss how variability can become “afforded” by various factors forming the record: the properties of the raw material; functional and economic contingencies of tools, actions, and subsistence strategies; parameters of cultural transmission; but also by our own sampling and excavation strategies and accumulative life-histories of places, objects, and materials.