Temporal Reasoning and Visualization across Periodized Archaeological Datasets: The Potential of the PeriodO Gazetteer

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the potential of the PeriodO period gazetteer to facilitate temporal reasoning and visualization in archaeological datasets, both within and between stratigraphic databases that refer to PeriodO definitions for their period terms, and within and between datasets using only natural-language labels. The application of temporal logic to the stratification of archaeological sites is a long-standing practice, but it has generally been carried out on a narrative basis or through tools such as the Harris Matrix. The widely varying temporal scales of the units of observation, from a coin dated to a specific year, to a radiocarbon date range, to a general stylistic period, have, however, made it difficult to automate the capture and visualization of formal temporal-logical relationships between deposits at a single site, let alone across multiple sites. In spatial operations, the use of Linked Data gazetteers has facilitated such operations, and this paper proposes that the same could be true for temporal relationships. We sketch out some paths toward the computational use of PeriodO identifiers in the validation of relative and absolute dates in stratigraphic datasets, the establishment of chronological sequences on the basis of temporal logic, and the comparison of these sequences across multiple datasets.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32735