Session Abstracts

Philip Verhagen
Dealing with uncertainty in archaeology

Archaeology is a science of uncertain findings. Whether we are registering finds, interpreting the stratigraphical, spatial and temporal relationships in an excavation, or performing a regional analysis of survey results, uncertainty – of location, dating and interpretation - is part of the archaeologist’s game. While this is generally acknowledged, the impact in archaeology of mathematical and statistical methods designed to establish uncertainty is limited. Even basic probability theory is not often used for this purpose outside the audience of CAA-conferences, let alone the application of more sophisticated methods like geostatistics, computer simulation, fuzzy logic, or Bayesian statistics.
The purpose of this session is to find out why. Is it the usual story that many archaeologists are not very analytically minded and a bit scared of numbers and technology? Is it the way in which the results are presented? Is it only useful for a limited number of questions? Or are these methods too complex and just confusing matters? Or am I too pessimistic, and are we actually witnessing a gradual acceptance of these methods in archaeology?
I would like to get together a broad selection of speakers, from various angles of quantitative/computing archaeology (GIS, virtual reality, classification etc.). Papers providing good case studies of dealing with uncertainty in archaeology are welcomed, together with theoretical papers trying to answer the question whether and when an explicit, quantitative assessment of uncertainty is actually useful for (computing and non-computing) archaeologists.

N.B. I realize that this proposal may overlap with various proposed sessions (especially the VR session on uncertainty). My intention is to take the issue of uncertainty out of the sub-disciplinary context, discuss it at a more interdisciplinary level, and try to establish some fruitful connections.

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