Site definition possibilities: Features excavated along a transect
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-10-16

Linear excavation projects as for street or pipeline construction offer a glimpse into the archaeological record for long but slim areas, cutting through past environments, burial grounds and settlements. Traditionally these continuous excavations have been divided into sites by Heritage Management for excavation organisation and individual analyses. In this talk I take the excavations along a transect as a sample of the archaeological record in the area and explore the possibility of defining settlements and typical settlement sizes using the features along the whole of the transect disregarding Heritage Management's site definitions. Settlement sizes are relevant for any further research question regarding settlement structure and hierarchy. There is a long-standing discussion on site and non- or off-site in survey archaeology, upon which this talk draws, but instead of using finds as units of observation, excavated features are utilised. The data base consists of features along a 13 km long street of mostly 40 m width near the city Köthen in Saxony-Anhalt. They date from the middle Neolithic to the early Iron Age. As typical cluster analysis algorithms as the F-, G- or Ripley's K-functions are heavily influenced by edge effects, simple distance measurements between all features of one period are taken as a proxy for clustering. Kernel density estimations and cumulative distributions of these distance values compared to values generated by random points (CSR) are used to gain an understanding of the settlement structures of the different periods. Statistical analyses have been realized with R.

(Sophie Charlotte Schmidt)