Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T06:37:06.308Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Decision-Tree Approach to the Interpretation of Archaeological Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2011

Summary

A number of techniques capable of generating descriptions of data have been developed in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Their suitability for use with a data set compiled to record the details of Anglo-Saxon structures in Britain is considered. An appropriate method which describes the data by means of decision trees is chosen and, after some adaptation, is used to generate descriptions of this data in the form of decision trees. The resulting descriptions compare favourably with interpretations obtained by archaeological analysis.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Doran, J. and Hodson, F. R. 1975. Mathematics and Computers in Archaeology, EdinburghGoogle Scholar
Fiol, G. and Miro-Nicolau, J. 1993. ‘Theoretical considerations about subset descriptions’, 3rd Int. Workshop on Computer-Aided Systems Theory and Techniques, University of Las Palmas, Grand Canary, 16Google Scholar
James, S., Marshall, A. and Millett, M. 1984. ‘An early Medieval building tradition’, Archaeol. J., 141, 182215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambert, J. M. and Williams, W. T. 1962. ‘Multivariate methods in plant ecology. IV. Nodal analysis’, J. Ecol, 50, 775802CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambert, J. M. and Williams, W. T., 1966. ‘Multivariate methods in plant ecology. VI. Comparison of information-analysis and association-analysis’, J EcoL, 54, 635664CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, A. and Marshall, G. J. 1991. ‘A survey and analysis of the buildings of early and middle Anglo-Saxon England’, Medieval Archaeol., 35, 2943CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, A. and Marshall, G. J., 1993. ‘Differentiation, change and continuity in Anglo-Saxon buildings’, Archaeol. J., 150, 366402CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michalski, R. S. and Larsen, J. B. 1978. ‘Selection of most representative training examples and incremental generation of VLi hypotheses’, Tech. Rep. 867, Dept. Comp. Sci., University of IllinoisGoogle Scholar
Pawlak, Z. 1982. ‘Rough sets’, Int. J. Inf. and Comp. Sci., 11, 341–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quinlan, R. 1986. ‘Induction of decision trees’, Machine Learning, 1, 81–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilcock, J. D. 1977. ‘A comparison of classifications of archaeological data’ in Computer applications in archaeology (ed. S. Laflin), 5560.Google Scholar