Can you dig this up for me?

December 28, 2009 2:32 AM

Assemblage (in an archaeological sense) - what's the oldest use of this term in this context?

Asking this on the green as I'm way out of my own field here, but it does touch (tangentially) on something I'm working on at present. Super smiley bonus points for referenced sources...

posted by Chairboy to Science & Nature (3 answers total)

I doubt very much one would ever find the first specific use of the word in an archaeological context, or when it was adopted as part of a professional lexicon. However, since the word in archaeological parlance is really not used much differently than its standard first definition, my dictionary lists the etymology as 1690. Since the practice of "modern" archaeology is really a 20th Century thing, I think you could say "20th Century, and more likely the latter half" and be reasonably confident of being correct. I dont think its possible to be more precise without years of research, which seems kind of silly.

I have no references.
posted by elendil71 at 5:09 AM on December 28, 2009

Best answer: Well, I did poke around JSTOR, since I'm at work and no one's here and I have access to it. By a strict definition of 'artefacts found in relation to another,' it's kind of hard to say. There's art-historical and general collectory speak regarding assembling artefacts - not in context, however. The earliest references JSTOR comes up with include non-technical references to groups of features, which could sort-of be considered to count.

Now, OED says
1959 J. D. CLARK Prehist. S. Afr. ii. 55 The preservation of more complete faunal assemblages.

However, a JSTOR search seems to show a semi-technical reference to assemblage in "Memorandum on the Mounds at Satsuma and Enterprise, Florida," William H. Dall The American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts © 1885 Archaeological Institute of America.

"The Ampullarias (A. depressa Say) which, as before men- tioned, are not disseminated through the mass but found assembled together in small patches, were therefore probably gathered elsewhere, perhaps at no great distance, and those in the mound are doubtless solely relics of dinners. The assemblage is just what we might expect in a fluvial marl and a similar assemblage would doubtless be found in a similar mass of the marl from the orange grove."

Later on, he uses assemblage in a more conventional sense ('assemblage of species')
posted by cobaltnine at 5:23 AM on December 28, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks very much cobaltnine - that's exactly the kind of detail I was looking for.
posted by Chairboy at 6:12 AM on December 28, 2009