3.2: Archaeological Context



Terracotta Nok statue in
archaeological context
Pangwari site, Nigeria. 
Another basic concept is that of the archaeological context. The archaeological record is made up of a series of individual contexts.  The context  is the three-dimensional spatial patterning of layers, deposits and features, the individual artefacts and other debris on a site, their groups and relationships. In practice the term is used as a reference to being the 'context' within which a certain group of individual pieces of evidence (artefacts, ecofacts, etc.) is contained and the boundaries of which form the bounds of the association between them. Isolated objects, removed for example by artefact hunting, are decontextualised, they have lost those associations. The concept of association is crucial to an understanding of archaeological inference.

The term provenance (or findspot) concerns a single artefact. It is an absolute (typically recorded with reference to an arbitrarily positioned horizontal grid and perhaps an arbitrary vertical reference plane - for example height a.s.l). X-marks the spot type information tell us very little beyond someone found a particular thing in a particular place.

Decontextualised fragment
of Nok Culture terracotta
head in the saleroom
Context and association, on the other hand, typically refer to the relationships within a context of two or more items of evidence or their groups (such as artefacts) but also with the particular sedimentary matrix or stratum in which they are incorporated. This allows us to infer that they are not only part of the same archaeological but also behavioural context (Lyman 2012). An object (for example) found in a particular context can allow us to infer not only the place, but also the situation in which it was used and discarded. The material contained in a context, its nature and state,  potentially provides information about the nature of the action that led to its deposition. The object is therefore evidence. That same object removed from that context merely becomes a thing.


Show and tell
An individual piece of information,  fragment of a figurine, some burnt soil, a bone, a brooch, has intrinsic meaning, in the sense it exists. Like any other object, one can make up an imaginary or speculative story about it. This is an innate human ability, it is an ability acquired by most kids at the age of four or five. As a form of entertainment, or a pointer to the mental and emotional state of the narrator, this kind of supposition-based (imaginitive) narrativisation can have significance, but the narrative itself has no academic value as a reconstruction of past events. The academic narrative of the past is based on analysing relationships between material facts in their context.

Dr Barbara Kipfer's 'Archaeology Wordsmith' online dictionary defines archaeological context as follows (spelling modified): 
The time and space setting of an artefact, feature, or culture. The context of a find is its position on a site, its relationship through association with other artefacts, and its chronological position as revealed through stratigraphy. [...]  An artefact's context usually consists of its immediate matrix (the material surrounding it e.g. gravel, clay, or sand), its provenience (horizontal and vertical position within the matrix), and its association with other artefacts (occurrence together with other archaeological remains, usually in the same matrix). The assessment of context includes study of what has happened to the find since it was buried in the ground.
It will be shown in the following sections that the horizontal and vertical spatial patterning of material in surface sites (for example exposed by deflation of dunes, water erosion, ploughing) is also archaeological context.

Wooden remains exposed by water erosion,
archaeological contexts on a surface site,
Bankside, London (Dr Fiona Haughey)

References:
Lyman, R.L. A Historical Sketch on the Concepts of Archaeological Association, Context, and Provenience. J Archaeol Method Theory 19, 207–240 (2012).



Tamara Kroftova comments:
"Again, since archaeological context is such a key concept, it is truly disturbing that there is so little discussion of the concept in insular archaeological outreach to artefact hunter. Again, many people seem to have got the notion that merely knowing a findspot is some kind of recontextualisation and thus an adequate replacement of the information lost when a find is ripped out of the archaeological record. It is very odd that British archaeologists have done so little to disabuse them of this notion".


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