Archaeological sequence diagrams, directed graphs and Bayesian chronological models,
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 06/11/2020

Dye and Buck have developed a graph theoretic approach to representing archaeological se-quence diagrams, such as the Harris Matrix. First, they use formal mathematical graph theory to construct “stratigraphic directed graphs”. These differ from previous software implementations of the Harris Matrix which employ a mix of directed graphs and other kinds of relations. Second, they have established that a “chronological directed graph” can be constructed alogorithmicallyfrom a stratigraphic directed graph. The chronological directed graph models the stratigraphic relationships needed to construct priors for Bayesian chronological models. As with many at-tempts at automating the management of archaeological information, however, the work thus far leaves many important questions unanswered. Amongst these are: how should we handle an archaeologist's inferences about once-whole contexts; how many extant excavation records might benefit from these methods; how desirable is it to enforce shared semantics in order to standardise record-keeping and processing; what tools are needed to help archaeologists move from chronological directed graphs of their full stratigraphic record to reduced versions which contain only the nodes to be dated via Bayesian chronological modelling? Such questions and many others are the motivation for the PhD work of Moody, which is sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and Historic England. In this presentation we will outline our graph theoretic approach, illustrate its strengths and weaknesses with examples and discuss our on-going work in this area.


Thomas S Dye, Bryony C Moody, Keith May, Caitlin E Buck