Geoarchaeology: exploration, environments, resources / Геоархеология: исследование, окружающая среда, ресурсы

Of all of the sciences utilized in modern archaeological research, that of geology has the longest history of association with archaeology. Surprisingly, perhaps, geoarchaeology as a recognized sub-discipline has taken slightly longer to establish itself than others such as bioarchaeology. There is still some uncertainty about what exactly geoarchaeology encompasses, and some differences of usage of the term between Europe and North America. This brief introduction explores some of these issues, and attempts to place the other contributions to this volume in a slightly broader context. 

Geoarchaeology here is used to describe the application of the geosciences to solve research problems in archaeology. The interaction between the sciences of geology and archaeology has a long and honourable history, going back to the early 19th century, when geology and prehistoric archaeology developed substantially in parallel. Conventionally, it is usual to consider primarily a subset of the geosciences as included within the term 'geoarchaeology', particularly geomorphology, sedimentology, pedology and stratigraphy. This priority perhaps reflects an observation made by Renfrew in 1976, in his introduction to one of the earliest volumes to use the term geoarchaeology (Davidson & Shackley 1976), that 'since archaeology, or at least prehistoric archaeology, recovers almost all its basic data by excavation, every archaeological problem starts as a problem in geoarchaeology' (Renfrew 1976). It also reflects the intensity of interest during the 1980s in the subject of site formation processes, to which these techniques have made a considerable contribution (e.g. Schiffer 1987). Chronology, although central to both archaeology and geology, is usually considered to be a separate sub-discipline. <...>