Artificial intelligence is an integrated part of our daily life and of many fields in research.
In the past twenty years archaeologists have discussed the potentials of, in particular, expert systems. They have developed some valuable systems, but the general impression is that archaeology is not a suitable host discipline for knowledge-based approaches. M.H. van den Dries sets out to validate this negative conclusion. She states that since most archaeological applications were mere prototypes and have never been subjected to objective tests, there is hardly any ground for this rather radical inference. In order to ground her conclusion objectively, Van den Dries has built two applications, an expert system and a neural network.