A stochastic model to simulate and predict archaeological landscape taphonomy: monitoring cultural landscape values based on an Iranian survey project

Kamal Aldin Niknami

«Archeologia e Calcolatori» 2007, 18, 101-120

Abstract

Archaeological scatters on the landscape present us with spatially patterned materials and features. Linking these spatial patterns to proximate aspects of scatter structure formation, and, ultimately, to understand the effect of land use systems in which landscape taphonomy occurred is one goal for landscape degradation analysis. While in the literature there has been a growing awareness of the pattern recognition problems posed by surface artifact distributions, due to the destruction or alteration of accompanying contextual information by landscape taphonomy processes, no substantive results have appeared in Iran. Analytical techniques for the description, classification and quantitative analysis of surface data remain poorly developed here and have often been incorrectly used and interpreted. The main concern of this paper is to investigate and interpret the effects of land use patterns on the distribution of surface artifacts. The discussion focuses on providing a quantitative model which constitutes an analytical framework integrating methods and theory. This project uses an example provided by the archaeological survey project undertaken at Garrangu River Basin from 1992 onwards in Northwestern Iran. As a case study, land use dynamics of an archaeological landscape were measured through the study period, and Markov Chain models were used to project observed changes of artifact distributional structures over a 50 year period.

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