Analysing settlement dynamics using statistics based on archaeological theory
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 31/08/2020

The mechanisms of settlement and land use in prehistory can be examined by testing the hy-pothesis that variations in spatio-temporal distribution of archaeological evidence of settlements mirror changes of the actual settlement patterns. To test this, we need a mathematical model describing the relation between the quantity of evidence and intensity of settlement activities which produced it. This model has to take into account all of the following uncertainties inherent to archaeological data: (1) The actual time and place of past events is not known and lies within the boundaries given by dating and localization of the evidence. (2) The events took place in areas which had a certain extent in time and space. (3) The observed distribution of evidence is affected by variations in feature visibility, sampling intensity and accuracy. We can test the null hypothesis that changes in spatio-temporal distribution of archaeological evidence can be explained by fluctuations stemming from these uncertainties. If we assume that an archaeolog-ically detected site of settlement activity (as defined by the settlement area theory) represents a spatio-temporal volume, rather than a single point in time and space, we need a probabilistic method, which considers spatial and temporal dimensions equally. We propose the evidence density  estimation  (EDE)  function,  which  can  be  applied  on  radiocarbon-dated  evidence  as  well as typo-chronologically dated evidence to produce spatio-temporal distribution maps or summed distributions representing intensity of settlement activities within the examined area. This research is supported by the MEYS grant no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000728.


Peter Demján