On Effective Theories of Macroarchaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeology reconstructs human behavior in the past from a biased, sparse, and fragmentary record, at multiple scales of space and time, from site-specific local events, to regional, continental, and global patterns. However, in practice, it is not always clear at which scale we are asking archaeological questions, and how different scales are integrated by theory. Across the sciences, the prefix “macro-“ (i.e., macroeconomics, macrophysics, macroevolution, and macroecology) refers to the macroscopic dynamics that emerge from lower level processes as we coarse-grain to larger scales. Effective theories are the invariant dynamics that allow us to generalize and renormalize across scales, the fundamental set of dynamics preserved as we coarse-grain: how do the general properties of one scale influence the general properties of other scales? I discuss how an integral aspect of the proposed “macroarchaeology” must be centered on the development of effective theories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39996.0