Abstract
The amount of information available to archaeologists has grown dramatically during the last ten years. The rapid acquisition of observational data and creation of digital data has played a significant role in this “information explosion”. In this paper, we propose new methods for knowledge creation in studies of movement, designed for the present data-rich research context. Using three case studies, we analyze how researchers have identified, conceptualized, and linked the material traces describing various movement processes in a given region. Then, we explain how we construct ontologies that enable us to explicitly relate material elements, identified in the observed landscape, to the knowledge or theory that explains their role and relationships within the movement process. Combining formal pathway systems and informal movement systems through these three case studies, we argue that these systems are not hierarchically integrated, but rather intertwined. We introduce a new heuristic tool, the “track graph”, to record observed material features in a neutral form which can be employed to reconstruct the trajectories of journeys which follow different movement logics. Finally, we illustrate how the breakdown of implicit conceptual references into explicit, logical chains of reasoning, describing basic entities and their relationships, allows the use of these constituent elements to reconstruct, analyze, and compare movement practices from the bottom up.
Highlights
Over the past two decades, the basis for the creation of archaeological knowledge about past societies archaeology has fundamentally changed
From a theoretical point of view, it is possible to present this complexity on the basis of well-described and relevant examples, it is much more difficult to envisage methods of analyzing it more globally and systematically on the basis of data sets that are, by definition, heterogeneous. How can these pathways composed of heterogeneous trace elements be identified? How to describe and organize the heterogeneous data on physical features and the information relating to movement in order to be able to analyze these pathways? How can all these pathways that structure the flow of movement in the landscape be identified? Attempting to meet this challenge, we propose the definition of a strictly abstract analytical concept based on graph theory which may be operationalized in terms of spatio-temporal analysis, the “track graph” referred to in the opening section of this paper
We set out to investigate the influence of the use of context- and observer-specific terminology on the study of past movement processes and pathway patterns based on observed features
Summary
Over the past two decades, the basis for the creation of archaeological knowledge about past societies archaeology has fundamentally changed. To address part of this problem of strong reinforcement of implicit knowledge, we propose an approach to integrating a re-reading of the rich but challenging written archive of archaeological research on a given topic with the existing information structures used in expert identifications of features in remote sensing data sources, focusing on extensive aerial data sources such as those derived from satellite imagery, aerial photography, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) To illustrate this approach, we explore the process of creating archaeological knowledge about past movement and the material evidence of its impact on the landscape. It presents the kind of intellectual complexity, shared by many topics salient to contemporary research on archaeological landscapes, which requires us to grapple with core issues of knowledge creation
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