eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

the life of an individual; and events that belong to day-to-day activities (e.g. Braudel 1969,
1972, 1983). Bintliff (1991, p.4) sees the Annales approach as providing a way of reconciling
two aspects of time: that of observed time seen from the outside, the reserve of the New
Archaeology; and that of experienced time from the inside, characteristic of traditional
approaches and some of which post-processualism is trying to recapture. Some archaeologists
(e.g. Binford 1981, Schiffer 1985) believe however that it is only the longue durée with which
archaeology can be viably concerned, especially when looking at the prehistoric past, and that
it is impossible for other scales to be reconstructed. Scholars such as Binford (1981) and
Schiffer (1985) state that attempting to look at the small-scale renders us guilty of the
“Pompeii premise.” This is only possible at sites like Pompeii, hence the name, where a
moment in time is truly captured. As such, it has been the longue durée and in particular
Braudel‘s (e.g.1972) work that has been used most in archaeological circles.
Despite this, there has been some concern over whether Braudel’s preference for the pre-
eminence of the longue durée suggests an actual causal relationship in that it largely
determines the lives of individuals, for example, the influence of demographics on social
change during the 15th to 18th centuries in The Structures of Everyday Life (1983).
However, other Annales scholars such as Le Roy Ladurie (1997) do focus upon daily routines
and thus the small scale. This is perhaps the place to warn against the assumption of Annales
as a unified school. Common ground can perhaps be found in the belief that a variety of
approaches to the past is preferable to the single view that traditionally focussed on ‘great
men’ and individual events. Nonetheless, the tripartite scheme of events, social life and the
long term, if not deterministic, reveals a picture of different levels spinning on their own axes
completely independently, unaware of the existence of the other levels and where changes in
one have no effect on others (Thomas 1996, p.35). There are also problems with such a
scheme in that it is difficult to see how the archaeological evidence relates to each timescale,
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