Digital Methods and Typology: New Horizons

Gianpiero Di Maida; Christian Horn; Stefanie Schaefer-Di Maida

doi:10.1515/opar-2022-0278

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Digital Methods and Typology: New Horizons

Gianpiero Di Maida , Christian Horn and Stefanie Schaefer-Di Maida

Published/Copyright: December 20, 2022

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From the journal Open Archaeology Volume 8 Issue 1

Abstract

An introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Methods and Typology, which briefly presents the topic covered in the volume, together with the hosted papers.

Keywords: digital archaeology; theory; methodology; material culture; proceedings

Typological analysis of archaeological artefacts has constituted the backbone of the discipline since its inception as a science in the modern sense (Adams & Adams, 1991). This enterprise though, which has engaged several generations of archaeologists from all branches and areas of expertise, did not come devoid of issues: especially its use as a tool to establish chronological sequences and to identify cultural entities and their characteristic material complexes, before (but also after) the advent of absolute methods of dating, has had the primary effect to contribute to the creation of categories (e.g., ethnical and/or cultural groups) that are still in use in the everyday practice of archaeological work and on whose dangers the research has warned from quite some time now (e.g., Jones, 1997). Despite this, due to a mix of hard-to-change habits, intrinsic difficulties connected to undertake large-scale projects and an undeniable concrete residual usefulness, these categories and classes have kept their place in the everyday practices of the discipline and have shown to be more resistant to substitution or abandonment than previously thought.

Despite these issues, typology is an essential means for ordering and classifying archaeological material and, therefore, belongs to the foundations of the scientific enterprise tout court. Although rapidly changing, at present, the application of any typological analysis is still bound to the naked-eye analysis and is difficult to be replaced by any automatised workflow. The current state of the methodological development, with its subjectivism, also contributes to the fact that many regional studies of typologies have now emerged, making comprehensive investigations increasingly difficult. The use of digital methods could therefore both contribute to the implementation of newer processes and be an excellent complement to the more traditional workflows. In the archaeological practice, a disconnect between the newer digital methods and the long-term theoretical and methodological development of traditional typology could be problematic or even detrimental to the discipline. It could either lead to a renewed positivist naïveté for presumably unproblematic, faster results that can avoid the pitfalls of interpretation, all the while dismissing well-matured archaeological methodologies. On the contrary, but equally undesirable, it could lead to a dismissal of computational archaeology and the many opportunities it can provide. In this already complicated situation, the recent increase in projects based on large-scale digitization of archaeological material (e.g., Di Maida & Hageneuer, 2022) has brought to the fore an urgent need for a conversation, which critically reflects on issues, connected to cataloguing and classification of this ample amount of collected data.

In the year of 2020, these problems and questions led us (both proponents of the classical typological method and modern digital archaeology) to decide to offer a session for the EAA in Kiel, which took place (digitally) in 2021 (Session #445, in a “6 slides in 6 min” format). We realised that a discussion of the relationship between traditional typology and digital methods was of great interest, so it seemed all the more important to publish the results of the respective research projects together: Six of the original papers from the above-mentioned session are hereby presented.

These are in short the details of this collection of papers that cover a very large area within present-day archaeological research with its main scope at the convergence between typological analysis and digital methods focussing on both theory and best practices.

Gianpiero Di Maida’s paper presents a short but complete overview of the relevance and the main characteristics of typology within archaeological research, and specifically in palaeolithic studies. Then, with the help of concrete examples taken from the history of research, he addresses some of the most common theoretical pitfalls within typological analyses, thus building a compelling case for an epistemological rethinking of this field.

Martin Hinz and Caroline Heitz, with their case study based on the Neolithic pottery from the Alpine region, show us a concrete attempt to surpass those very same pitfalls of traditional typological analyses by testing an automated, unsupervised method of classification.

Christian Horn and colleagues focus their attention on the hot topic of machine learning and – to paraphrase a famous aphorism – ask the crucial question, “who teaches the teachers themselves”. By using the case of Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art, they discuss the central topics of bias, consistency, and apparent errors in the classification of ambiguous material, seeing it as an opportunity of bringing researchers and the algorithms they use into a dialogue.

In a series of case studies, the remaining papers offer the readers a representative spectrum of concrete situations, which are frequently encountered by researchers in their investigations. Therefore, these contributions represent important information and solutions with high potential for implementation in a wide variety of contexts. Yang Bai’s paper applies multivariant analysis to obtain a more nuanced picture of burial practices in Late Neolithic China (Taosi cemetery). The study of these data was unsatisfactory for a long time because it heavily tilted towards a labour-expenditure-based analysis only. The new approach improves this situation leading to a more balanced and nuanced new picture.

James Francis Loftus focuses in his paper on the Early Neolithic Pottery of Japan and subjects his material to geometric-morphometric analyses. Despite not being well dated in absolute-chronological terms, this investigation draws a complex picture where the simultaneous presence of indigenous and immigrating traditions coexists with standardization and innovation processes.

Finally, Esther Travé Allepuz brings us to the medieval and post-medieval utilitarian pottery of Spain. This under-researched earthenware assemblage is subjected to a morphometric analysis, which shows that there is a treasure of information that has so far been overlooked, which includes a new regional classification with a significant impact on the chronology of this material.

We hope that the depth of methodological and theoretical considerations and the breadth of the data presented in these papers contribute and stimulate the discussion around scientific classification at the nexus of traditional typology and digital archaeology; that they will demonstrate the importance and urgent need for shared best practice approaches; and, last but not least, that they will play a role in triggering new scientific advancements and breakthroughs.

Special Issue on Digital Methods and Typology, edited by Gianpiero Di Maida, Christian Horn & Stefanie Schaefer-Di Maida.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editorial board of Open Archaeology, for the kind invitation to host this special issue and for the fruitful colalboration during the past year.

Funding information: GDM: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), grant-no. 01UG1885X. CH: Riksbankens Jubileumsfund grant-no. IN18-0557:1; Swedish Research Council grant-no. 2020-03817. StSDM: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Collaborative Research Centre 1266 ‘Scales of Transformation’, project-no. 2901391021.
Conflict of interest: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

References

Adams, W. Y. & Adams, E. W. (1991). Archaeological typology and practical reality: A dialectical approach to artifact classification and sorting. New York: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511558207Search in Google Scholar

Di Maida, G. & Hageneuer, S. (2022). The DISAPALE Project: A new digital repository of lithic and bone artefacts. Lithic Technology, 47(4), 283–295. doi: 10.1080/01977261.2022.2048511.Search in Google Scholar

Jones, S. (1997). The archaeology of ethnicity. Constructing identities in the past and present. London and New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2022-11-30

Accepted: 2022-11-30

Published Online: 2022-12-20

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2022-0278

Keywords for this article

digital archaeology; theory; methodology; material culture; proceedings

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