Fraser Sturt (University of Southampton)

Our understandings of change and perception are too frequently ones of linear, predictable progression. In this paper I argue that those
interested in the story of the changing relationships between people and their biophysical surrounds have much to offer the broader
discipline, through an appreciation of concurrent change and variability across space and time. Through case studies based on work
in both the Fens and the Channel islands, a case will be made for an archaeology within which harmonic rather than melodic accounts are
created. Here the importance of appreciating the impact of small scale, localised changes in order to address broader archaeological questions of cultural transformation and social change will be demonstrated.