Heuristic approaches to spatial analysis in archaeology.
Keith W. Kinitigh
- Estados Unidos-US : Society for American Archaeology, 1982.
- páginas 31-63: ilustraciones en blanco y negro.
- Trimestral
- vol.47; n.1 (Jan.1982)
- American Antiquity. Journal of the Society for American Archaeology ; no.1 .
- Soociety for American Archaeology. .
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 apllied to artificial settlement data and artifact distributions from the Magdalenian camp of Pincevent. Finally the prospects for further development of heuristic methods are elaborated.