Site Catchment Archaeology Definition
A method of rebuilding the economy of a site by examining available resources within a reasonable distance, usually a 1-2 hour walk from the site. The technique was developed by E. Higgs and C. Vita-Finzi to study “the relationship between technology and natural resources that lie in the economic domain of individual sites,” an extension of the principle of least cost. The catchment area is defined by drawing a circle around the field; The radius was often set at 5 km (one hour of walking) for farmers and 10 km (or two hours of walking) for hunter-gatherers, figures representing ethnographically observed averages. Within the catchment area, the proportions of resources such as arable land or pastures are calculated, and these figures allow conclusions to be drawn about the nature and function of the area. The technique provides a valuable and reasonably objective method for analyzing the relationships between location, technology, and available resources. This type of offsite analysis can focus on the overall area from which a site`s content was derived. A significant increase indicates a pathological condition at the site of its origin. From: Site Catchment Analysis in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology » But it has never been the place of the same mercy, and it never will be. So I drove around the corner to the starting point of the forest road that led to the accident site.
Systematic study of an arbitrarily defined area around a number of known sites in order to be able to compare the main characteristics of these areas to verify the pattern or regularity. Developed by Eric Higgs and Claudio Vita-Finzi in the late 1960s, watershed analysis aimed to reconstruct part of the economics of archaeological sites. The size of search areas can be based on the sources of material found on the site or on fictitious work areas, such as the distance that could be covered during a day`s travel. The Macmillan Dictionary of Archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983 The NOPD fired Knight in 1973 for stealing timber from an off-duty construction site. Search: `watershed analysis` in Oxford Reference » Instead, the man and woman in the truck wanted to know where the crash site was and if I could show it. The escort site Cowboys4Angels peddles chiseled and hot-bodied men and their smoking model looks at women willing to pay. added by archaeologists method to attempt to reconstruct the economics of archaeological sites, introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s by E.S. Higgs and his colleague C.
Vita-Finzi. A “site catchment area” is defined as the total area from which all animals, plants and artifacts of which remains remain remain on the site originate. It is believed that each group of people living on the site had a “territory”, the area around the land they used before. A territory for a hunter-gatherer group is assumed to be an area within a two-hour walk of the site due to ethnographic parallels. For similar reasons, the area in question for farmers is considered an area less than an hour`s walk away. Territories are determined by leaving the site along a series of radii. The resources contained in each area are then assessed by walking on the ground and looking for water sources, slope fluctuations, soils, drainage, etc. A less comprehensive, widely used method is simply to draw a circle of 5 km or 10 km around the terrain. These correspond respectively to the radius of one hour and the radius of two hours in the “optimum” field. Many assumptions from the site basin analysis cannot be verified and may be worthless.
Particular care must be taken to ensure that evidence of environmental changes in an area is taken into account. This could lead to a completely different geography, resources and land use of ancient land than today. However, the technique places archaeological sites in the context of their environment, which has too often been ignored.
