Abstract

Moving Between Scales has Always been Important to Archaeologists. This chapter examines the extent to which spatial and temporal scales of investigation are transformed when the focus of archaeological study is shifted from the distant past to the present or recent past. It notes how new multi-scalar domains have been opened up through recent technological development, and acknowledges the extent to which disciplinary ways of seeing and doing have been altered by rapid adoption of some of the very devices that might also be objects of study. The fractal nature of modern synthetic materials and environments, with artefactual structure observable at almost every level or scale of analysis from the very large to the very small, is also explored. Archaeology, it is argued, is inevitably changed by its encounter with modern materials and the multiple scales encapsulated therein.