Discourse And Argumentation In Archaeology Conceptual And Computational Approaches

This book covers the topic of discourse and argumentation in archaeology with an aim to serve the archaeology community. The book presents discourse and argument analysis approaches and techniques in an affordable manner and applied to archaeological situations. It focuses on techniques and approaches that can be applicable to multiple situations, periods and cultures. The book begins with an introduction to discourse and argumentation analysis as a general field and also as an auxiliary technique to archaeology. The work includes conceptual applications, ranging from causality, ontological connections, vagueness, social production of discourse and public debates. The work also devotes a section to computational approaches and describes the specifics of some well-known families of algorithms such as lexical processing, information extraction or sentiment analysis. The conclusion comments on the future and which reflects on the previous chapters and discusses how the presented techniques and approaches should be adapted or improved for easier and more powerful application to archaeology. Contributing authors bring perspectives from archaeology, linguistics, and computer science.

The book describes a novel approach to early cities that is transdisciplinary, scientific, historical, and based on social-science knowledge.

NeutroGeometry is one of the most recent approaches to geometry. In NeutroGeometry mod-els, the main condition is to satisfy an axiom, definition, property, operator and so on, that is neither entirely true nor entirely false. When one of these concepts is not satisfied at all it is called AntiGeometry. One of the problems that this new theory has had is the scarcity of models. Another open problem is the definition of angle and distance measurements within the framework of NeutroGeometry. This paper aims to introduce a general theory of distance measures in any NeutroGeometry. We also present an algorithm for distance measurement in real-life problems.

This book contains a collection of papers discussing questions related to space and movement in the framework of computational archaeology, landscape archaeology, historical geography and archaeological theory. The contributions, written by recognized experts in the field, show how the study of settlements pattern and movement has been dramatically transformed by the use of technology like Geographic Information System (GIS). The papers focus on the ways to approach past movement using GIS in archaeological landscape studies: theoretical, technical and interpretative issues are addressed and explored. They provide the state of the art in theory and methodology and show, by using case studies, the potential of the developed approaches for the understanding of factors and effects of landscape formation and transformation in the long term.

This volume of original chapters written by experts in the field offers a snapshot of how historical built spaces, past cultural landscapes, and archaeological distributions are currently being explored through computational social science. It focuses on the continuing importance of spatial and spatio-temporal pattern recognition in the archaeological record, considers more wholly model-based approaches that fix ideas and build theory, and addresses those applications where situated human experience and perception are a core interest. Reflecting the changes in computational technology over the past decade, the authors bring in examples from historic and prehistoric sites in Europe, Asia, and the Americas to demonstrate the variety of applications available to the contemporary researcher.

Provides analytical theories offered by innovative artificial intelligence computing methods in the archaeological domain.

In a discipline which essentially studies how modern man came to be, it is remarkable that there are hardly any conceptual tools to describe change. This is due to the history of the western intellectual and scientific tradition, which for a long time favoured mechanics over dynamics, and the study of stability over that of change. Change was primarily deemed due to external events (in archaeology mainly climatic or 'environmental'). Revolutionary innovations in the natural and life sciences, often (erroneously) referred to as 'chaos theory', suggest that there are ways to overcome this problem. A wide range of processes can be described in terms of dynamic systems, and modern computing methods enable us to investigate many of their properties. This volume presents a cogent argument for the use of such approaches, and a discussion of a number of its aspects by a range of scientists from the humanities, social and natural sciences, and archaeology.

Archaeological Theory in Dialogue presents an innovative conversation between five scholars from different backgrounds on a range of central issues facing archaeology today. Interspersing detailed investigations of critical theoretical issues with dialogues between the authors, the book interrogates the importance of four themes at the heart of much contemporary theoretical debate: relations, ontology, posthumanism, and Indigenous paradigms. The authors, who work in Europe and North America, explore how these themes are shaping the ways that archaeologists conduct fieldwork, conceptualize the past, and engage with the political and ethical challenges that our discipline faces in the twenty-first century. The unique style of Archaeological Theory in Dialogue, switching between detailed arguments and dialogical exchange, makes it essential reading for both scholars and students of archaeological theory and those with an interest in the politics and ethics of the past.

This book describes a novel machine-learning based approach to answer some traditional archaeological problems, relating to archaeological site detection and site locational preferences. Institutional data collected from six Swiss regions (Zurich, Aargau, Grisons, Vaud, Geneva and Fribourg) have been analyzed with an original conceptual framework based on the Random Forest algorithm. It is shown how the algorithm can assist in the modelling process in connection with heterogeneous, incomplete archaeological datasets and related cultural heritage information. Moreover, an in-depth review of past and more recent works of quantitative methods for archaeological predictive modelling is provided. The book guides the readers to set up their own protocol for: i) dealing with uncertain data, ii) predicting archaeological site location, iii) establishing environmental features importance, iv) and suggest a model validation procedure. It addresses both academics and professionals in archaeology and cultural heritage management, and offers a source of inspiration for future research directions in the field of digital humanities and computational archaeology.