In recent years, archaeology has increasingly applied a wide range of research techniques from the natural and social sciences to the interpretation of evidence. This volume brings together contributions from internationally-renowned scholars in a diverse range of disciplines. It examines the implications for archaeology of the most recent developments. and highlights important new areas of research into the use of dynamical systems to explain change.

In a discipline which essentially studies how modern man came to be, it is remarkable that there are hardly any conceptual tools to describe change. This is due to the history of the western intellectual and scientific tradition, which for a long time favoured mechanics over dynamics, and the study of stability over that of change. Change was primarily deemed due to external events (in archaeology mainly climatic or 'environmental').
Revolutionary innovations in the natural and life sciences, often (erroneously) referred to as 'chaos theory', suggest that there are ways to overcome this...