Heuristic approaches to spatial analysis in archaeology

TLDR: An approach to spatial analysis which is more closely tailored to archaeological objectives and archaeological data than are more "traditional" quantitative techniques such as nearest neighbor analysis is discussed.

Abstract: This article discusses an approach to spatial analysis which is more closely tailored to archaeological objectives and archaeological data than are more "traditional" quantitative techniques such as nearest neighbor analysis. Heuristic methods, methods which make use of the problem context and which are guided in part by intuitively derived "rules," are discussed in general and with reference to the problem of spatial analysis in archaeology. A preliminary implementation of such a method is described and applied to artificial settlement data and artifact distributions from the Magdalenian camp of Pincevent. Finally, the prospects for further development of heuristic methods are elaborated. SPATIAL ANALYSIS MAY BE SEEN as a process of searching for theoretically meaningful patterns in spatial data. Of course, this problem has been approached by archaeologists in several ways. The most obvious method of spatial analysis is the visual examination of a point distribution on a map with relevant background information in mind. This intuitive approach has been forsaken (and berated) by many archaeologists with greater aspirations to rigor, in favor of quantitative techniques of spatial analysis, such as nearest neighbor analysis. These techniques generally yield a summary statistic which attempts to characterize the spatial pattern with a single number and perhaps test its significance. The summary statistic is commonly compared from period to period or from area to area. This article reports the progress of an experiment in an alternative approach to the analysis of spatial patterns. This approach, the heuristic approach, is synthetic in that it attempts to open the way for the use of contextual knowledge and human expertise within a formal (computerexecuted) procedure for aiding human-directed spatial analysis. This presentation starts with a brief review of "traditional" quantitative approaches to spatial analysis. It is followed by a discussion of heuristic approaches to problem solving and their application to spatial analysis in archaeology. In the next section, heuristic procedures that have been developed are applied to artificial data sets and then to an analysis of actual data from the Magdalenian camp of Pincevent. The article closes with a discussion of the conclusions of this experiment and prospects for further development.