FORMALIZED APPROACH TO SPATIAL ARCHAEOLOGY USING ALGORITHMIC MODELLING
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-11-15

Regions with environmental conditions favorable to human habitation, such as Central Bohemia, offer an archaeologically interesting but very complex image. As a result of decades of archaeological activity, we often see large areas continuously covered with archaeological finds of different - mostly very broad - dating. They are a palimpsest in which we try to identify settlements of communities existing in a particular time and space in order to analyze them in terms of structure, density, their relation to environment and each other. This paper presents a formalized approach to community areas as defined by the theoretical framework of spatial archaeology. Information about the spatial context of the settlement evidence allows us to reconstruct possible configurations of habitation areas and their adjacent primary production areas (settlement cores). A more detailed phasing transcending the low chronological resolution of the original data was achieved by using mutual spatial exclusion of settlement cores as a chronological marker. The set of reconstructed possible scenarios, large enough to offer a representative sample of all possible scenarios, was produced using algorithmic modeling and analyzed using probabilistic methods. Such formalized approach to spatial archaeology made it possible to leverage the potential of existing rich archaeological settlement evidence, which until now resisted attempts at interpretation. The results can be used to assess the intensity of human impact on the landscape in various periods as well as changes in the structural organization of the settlements.

Author(s): Demján, Peter (Institute of Archaeology CAS)