Articles by Franco Niccolucci

In its four years of activity the ARIADNE project has created a catalogue of European digital archives which offers a portal that makes it possible to search the repository, where about two million datasets are recorded. The project has implemented an Open Data system applying the FAIR principles (Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable), and making available a concrete re-use of these important information sources, which otherwise would be difficult to access as most of the contents are unpublished.

Locating archaeological cultures in time and space is a major challenge of archaeolog-ical research. Despite more than a century of scientific research in archaeology, a satisfactory solution has yet to be proposed. Past attempts to look into the problem focused on sharpening the definition of types of material culture artefacts, a more accurate chronological dating of such objects, various probabilistic methods or GIS solution for defining the time-space borders of archaeological cultures. However, the proposed approaches did not fully consider how the nature of archaeological cultures and their consequent dating and geographic positioning play a crucial role in assigning spatio-temporal borders. We propose to shift the operating logical paradigm in archaeology, from a crisp, Aristotelian-based logic, to fuzzy logic, in our opinion more suitable for reasoning in archaeology. We also introduce the rough sets theory to deal with chronological and geographic positioning of archaeological cultures. Both concepts have, in our opinion, substantial advantages over the traditional algebra and logic rules (implicitly) applied so far.

ARIADNE brings together and integrates existing archaeological research data infrastructures, so that researchers can use the various distributed datasets and new and powerful technologies as an integral component of the archaeological research methodology. ARIADNE is funded by the European Commission under the Community’s Seventh Framework Programme, contract no. FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2012-1-313193. The project started on 1st February 2013 and runs for 48 months.

Current official definitions of “museum” in different countries are examined, together with their implications: the role of museums, their characteristics, the activities museums are expected to conduct. The presence of virtual museums on the Internet is also evaluated. As far as archaeology is concerned, the term “musealization” is analyzed, which denotes the operations necessary to transform a monument or a site into a tourist destination; therefore it brings in itself two opposite meanings of preservation, by means of organized actions and favoring the access and the economic exploitation of the heritage resources. The aspects of technology and virtuality available to museum and archaeological site curators are given in detail, describing dedicated international projects. The author concludes by analyzing the issue of the user’s perspective in the virtual museum as well as the requirements of specialized scholars.

This paper deals with the application of fuzzy logic to archaeological research. Fuzzy logic is based on a continuum of truth values ranging from 0 (False) to 1 (True) and thus may help whenever there exists some uncertainty on data assignment to predetermined categories. After examining the features and drawbacks of typological classification and the problem of gender and age assignment in cemetery excavations, the fundamentals of fuzzy logic are summarized. Four examples of archaeological applications are then presented. The first example deals with a necropolis in which tombs present a high degree of uncertainty as far as sex and age of the deceased are concerned. Therefore it is suggested to use a fuzzy database management system, i.e. a DBMS implementing fuzzy logic and function, for data storage and processing. Such a database software was previously developed for this application. In the following three examples, classification problems are considered and it is shown how the use of fuzzy logic may change their archaeological interpretation. The authors claim that a generalized use of fuzzy logic, as is widely applied in other sciences, may improve the quality of data processing and above all produce reliable and transparent results, or at least illustrate the degree of reliability the researcher grants to those data.

It is well known that interpretation always conveys a certain degree of subjectivity, which disappears as soon as interpreted data are stored in a computer database. This may lead to dangerous approximation and possibly to fallacious conclusions. To avoid this oversimplification, it has been suggested to use fuzzy databases, in which attributes may have a fuzzy nature and be indexed by a numerical coefficient, the fuzzy coefficient, which can be interpreted as the degree of confidence the researcher has in each possible assigned value. This technique has been successfully applied to gender and age assignment for the deceased in a cemetery investigation: in this case anthropological data offered statistical parameters that could be used to compute the fuzzy coefficient. Lithics classification is another field in which fuzzy databases have a potential usefulness, but in this case, no previous statistics may help in determining the fuzzy coefficient. We decided to perform an experiment during a standard typological classification of a flint tool assemblage from Israel. It concerned the classification of 50 tools, by different researchers. Each one was asked to note, besides the typology of each item, an evaluation of the 'degree of sureness', or the 'possibility' of an item to belong to a particular type, in other words his or her guessed estimate of the fuzzy coefficient. This paper reports the results of this experiment, in order to evaluate the difference between researchers when performing a classification of tools, to recognize problematic types or items (which mostly differed between the typological lists presented) and eventually to compute a fuzzy coefficient for each type assignment, balancing the different evaluations of experts.

The paper examines the applications of some software technologies in archaeological research and discusses a number of errors that may derive from a naïve approach. In considering databases, relational databases have strict requirements that are fulfilled in most cases when dealing with archaeological records, but cannot be given for granted without further investigation. It is suggested that XML technology may solve many of these issues. Digital Elevation Models generated automatically by GIS software may create undesired or unrealistic terrain features and introduce errors, as well as GPS data acquisition. The frequent absence in archaeological GIS papers of an error analysis confirms the lack of a critical approach to these mathematical tools. Finally, computer visualisation is examined in the paper, with a similar criticism to an exclusively visual interpretation of Virtual Reality reconstructions. Since all the tools examined in the paper were created within other applicative contexts, it is hoped that a more conscious approach may better integrate them into archaeological method and theory.

Introduction to the Proceedings.

This paper describes a database management system created for organising the data which emerged during an investigation conducted by a team from the University of Florence in Petra, Jordan. The subject of the research are Crusader settlements in Transjordan and, in particular, the castle system of the Petra valley; the study employed a methodological approach based on so-called “light archaeology”, that is a set of methods typical of European Medieval archaeology like “landscape archaeology” and “standing structure archaeology”. The study, which is still in progress, has revealed the key role of Petra in the territorial organisation of Transjordan during the Crusader period. By focusing on Wu’ayra, the most important fortress of the Petra valley, by means of a series of trial trenches, the project has documented the different settlement stages of the site. It is now apparent that the site was defended by a double wall overhanging the surrounding wadi with a single access and fourteen square towers on the outer ring and the inner walls, and an extreme defence nucleus, the fortified church, inside the cassero, in the centre of the system. Of the nine stages studied so far, three concern the Crusader settlement, one a very short occupation by the Ayyubids, and five correspond to the phase of abandonment of the castle with subsequent occasional use by Bedouin communities. The investigation will eventually evolve into a wide ranging study of the Crusader border, from Antioch to Aqaba. The computer project consists of a database management system, which is based on a Java servlet, a software which uses the HTTP protocol to generate and submit HTML pages “on demand”, and which can be viewed using a common Internet browser. This helps communication and simplifies access to data, which can also be shared on-line. Future developments will include spatial information, based on freely available GIS software. A particular feature of this investigation is the close connection which is maintained between computer technology and archaeological methods, which envisages new forms of co-operation in interdisciplinary research and new skills that draw from both disciplines.

This contribution deals with the survey of medieval sites in Tuscany, carried out to record territorial, topographical, historical and archaeological data and to integrate these different kinds of sources. It studies the region corresponding to the ancient county owned by the Ardengheschi family, in the south of Tuscany. The collected data are organised into a relational database; its most important tables contain administrative, geographical, environmental, historical and archaeological (descriptive and interpretative) data. Each database record is also geographically referenced by means of the coordinates of the central point of the corresponding site. This organisation makes it possible to investigate chronological and spatial relationships among sites. Some examples show the inadequacy of Euclidean distance and how it can be correctly defined to obtain coherent results; others deal with the definition of “contemporary” settlements, and it is shown how paradoxical results may derive from a “blind” use of database queries. To avoid such consequences, the use of “fuzzy logic” is proposed to define the lifetime of a site, especially if historical and archaeological records span over different periods; an application of fuzzy logical operators is considered in a final example.