Through the archaeological process the material world undergoes a series of transformations and translations whereby each successive stage takes the place of the original situation. With each successive step from field walking, drawing sections, taking photographs, sampling, measuring, narrating, etc. we lose "locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity" yet we gain "compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality". The series of references established along this chain finds its "fruition"in the form of some final publication with the references, be they field notebooks, context sheets, context photos, the archaeological "finds", etc. maintained in the form of a project archive, which is rarely revisited post publication.

Still, the purpose of the chain of references is to facilitate our retracing the process of transformation and translation. One must be able to follow the chain of references back to the material world focused upon--thus the idea that the process is reversible, that it circulates.

Bruno Latour's notion of circulating reference is the basis for the notion of multiple fields.

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