[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology

## Details

**Authors** Harris, Oliver J. T.

**Year** 2017

**Publisher** Cambridge Archaeological Journal

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Archaeology

**Secondary disciplines** Anthropology

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774316000597) 
10.1017/s0959774316000597

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To use assemblage theory to rethink scale in archaeology, and to consider what kind of reality large-scale archaeological categories should be given.

### How they did it (methods)

Theoretical argument in archaeology; no empirical dataset reported on the page consulted.

### What they found (results)

The author argues that archaeology has oscillated between large-scale 'great processes' and the small-scale ethnographic present, and that Annales-influenced and time-perspectivist attempts to integrate them rely on fixed, linear layers of history. Assemblages are proposed as a way to explain how multiple scales emerge and matter historically without making small-scale differences an epiphenomenon of large events or large-scale categories mere reifications.

## Commentary

### In short

An archaeological essay arguing that scale should be understood through assemblages rather than through fixed layers of history. It aims to keep both small-scale events and large-scale processes real without reducing either to the other.

### Response

The paper's central problem is how wholes at different scales relate to the smaller things composing them (S), and how those scales act on and emerge from one another (R). The fit is partial: the work is theoretical, and its vocabulary of assemblage, not of nested systems, so the mapping to part-whole structure is an interpretation. Distinctions and perspectives are not clearly central on the evidence read.

**Patterns it shows** S, R

Shows the structure is there

**Added** 2026-10-16

**How to cite this** Harris, Oliver J. T. (2017). Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal.