Bringing archaeology into the information age: entropy, noise, channel capacity, and information potential in archaeological significance assessments

Abstract

Most archaeology today is conducted by private cultural resources management (CRM) firms in compliance with preservation legislation. Industry archaeologists make decisions that affect the expenditure of public and private development funds, and determine what resources, data, and information are available for the future. Decisions about what is archaeologically significant impact public value purchased by governments and firms, and impact cumulative ability to know the archaeological record. While there are many concepts of archaeological significance, many justify significance in terms of the information yield. Few define information. Discussions are confused by vague or absent definitions of information, and the conflation of data volume with information resulting in bias in the types of resources preserved. Perpetuating modern theoretical interests into the preserved data hobbles future archaeology. In the interest of representative preservation of archaeological information, we need an operational definition of “information” and which resources have information potential. To unify and organize discussions of information and representative samples, I turn to information theory. Claude E. Shannon provides a formal definition of “information”. Applying Shannon’s concepts of entropy and equivocation provides formal tools to objectively assess relative and absolute information potential, and can force CRM practitioners to more explicitly justify their recommendations for expenditure of public and private development funds and preserve a more representative sample of the archaeological record for future inquiry. Bringing archaeology into the information age is a practical solution to many problems with CRM significance evaluations, and will better justify the value CRM provides in return for public investment in archaeology.