Where does assemblage collide?

In archaeology an assemblage is the group of artifacts recovered together from a single context or deposit, such as one layer, pit, or occupation floor. Childe (1929), in The Danube in Prehistory, built the idea of an archaeological culture on the recurring assemblage of artifact types found together across sites, and Clarke's 1968 Analytical Archaeology fixed the assemblage as a defined analytic unit sitting between the single artifact and the culture-group. The referent here is a physical collection of human-made objects tied to a place and a stratum, counted and compared as evidence of past behavior, not a grouping of living species, a philosophical whole, or a work of art.[1][2]

Unit

The artifacts from one context, counted and typed by class and frequency

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Recorded by excavation and quantified as artifact counts, type frequencies, and their association within a context

In art an assemblage is a three-dimensional work built by joining found objects and fragments into a single composition. Jean Dubuffet used the word for such works in the early 1950s, and Seitz's 1961 exhibition and catalogue The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art gathered the practice under that name and traced it back through Cubist collage. The referent is a made object in a gallery, assembled from pre-existing materials, and it has nothing in common with a stratified group of excavated artifacts, a set of coexisting organisms, or a philosophical whole beyond the shared word.[3]

Unit

A single assembled artwork, described by its materials and construction

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Described by art history and criticism through its materials, construction, and place in the lineage of collage and assemblage

In philosophy an assemblage, translating the French agencement, is a whole made of heterogeneous parts whose identity comes from how those parts function together rather than from what they are made of. Deleuze and Guattari introduced the notion in their 1980 Mille plateaux (translated as A Thousand Plateaus), and DeLanda's 2006 A New Philosophy of Society reworked it into a general account of how social wholes form from the relations between their components. The referent is an abstract relational whole with its own capacities, not a physical group of dug-up objects, a gallery work, or a set of organisms sharing a place.[4][5]

Unit

One relational whole, characterized by the capacities its components give it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analyzed conceptually by tracing the components, relations, and capacities that hold the whole together

In ecology an assemblage is the set of species, often within one taxonomic or functional group, that occur together in a given place and time. Fauth and colleagues (1996), in Simplifying the jargon of community ecology, defined the assemblage precisely as the species within a community that belong to a single taxonomic group, separating it from the fuller community and from the guild. The referent is a collection of coexisting organisms delimited by taxonomy and locality, recorded as which species are present and in what numbers, and it is distinct from a deposit of artifacts, an assembled artwork, or a philosophical whole.[6]

Unit

The co-occurring species of a taxon in one place, by presence and abundance

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Sampled in the field and summarized by species lists, abundance, richness, and composition