Internet Archaeol. 16. Whitley. Indirect causal references

3.2 Indirect causal references

A second type of proxy variable may be thought of as being an indirect causal reference (Figure 3b). This would refer to measurable spatial variables that in themselves do not stimulate the cognitive behaviour, but they affect other immeasurable variables that do. For example, many spatial decisions are the product of familiarity. We would not expect any cultural group to be able to exploit fully an area or region with which they were unfamiliar. Nor would we expect a group (or individual for that matter) to have complete and accurate spatial knowledge of areas outside their territory. Territorial boundaries are, in fact, often conceived in wholly conceptual form, and not marked in the landscape in any formal way, but rendered in the mind as an assessment of familiarity. One proxy variable that may be used to represent landscape familiarity indirectly is a distance or cost distance evaluation from well-known areas. The presumption is that the further away individuals travel from their normal place of residence, the less likely they are to know about local conditions.

Obviously distance (or cost distance) from a given point on the landscape did not cause a lack of spatial familiarity; we can clearly have detailed spatial information about areas very far from home as well as lack spatial information for areas quite nearby. Nor can we argue that length of time spent in residence anywhere will necessarily increase a detailed understanding of the surrounding landscape. Instead, we can only argue that distance from a residential location is statistically causally related to knowledge of the surroundings. But we are not arguing that people in the past used a measurement of distance or cost distance to determine their own level of spatial familiarity. Therefore, our measured variable (distance/cost distance analysis) is an indirect causal proxy for level of detailed spatial knowledge in past societies. We are measuring distance and they were cognitively assessing spatial familiarity.