Articles by Albertus Voorrips

This paper consists of some notes and comments on the use of electronic information systems in archaeology, in the form of stating a number of theses, each followed by an explanation and/or defence. Most of the theses pertain to the relationship among research design, relational database management system and geographical information system. The last section of the paper shortly discusses some projects in which electronic information systems are being used.

In the first section of this paper, some of the developments in the use of information science in archaeology are discussed, putting them in a more general framework of developments in archaeological theory. It shows the shift from “classical” statistical approaches, which concentrate on hypothesis testing, towards more heuristic, pattern searching methods of analysis. In the second section, some research is presented on the use of Bayesian statistics for solving archaeological problems. It illustrates, on the one hand, the case with which rather complicated quantitative analyses can be performed with the help of standard computing tools, and, on the other hand, the risks of carrying out such analyses without a clear, logically sound underpinning.