Space-Time in the Matrix and the Uses of Allen Temporal Operators for Stratigraphic Analysis

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.

Records of archaeological stratigraphic data and the relationships between separately identified stratigraphic units are fundamental to understanding the overall cohesiveness of an archaeological excavation during fieldwork, analysis, publication, and in any resulting archive. Having divided the archaeology into various units for recording purposes, we use stratigraphy and associated temporal logical relationships recorded between the physical materials as the "reasoning glue" to connect all these different spatial and temporal phenomena, in the form of Stratigraphic Units, Phases, and Periods, back together again with various narratives to explain our conclusions. For "single-context recording" widely used in the UK and beyond, most archaeological temporal reasoning is based on the principles of stratigraphic superposition, the "Above and Below relationship." But further principles of temporal reasoning are also available. The CIDOC CRM uses the Allen operators to describe not just superposition but a set of more complex temporal logical relationships that can pertain between archaeological data. This paper will give an insight into how conceptual reference modeling can be used to explore these issues and how associated semantic technologies can enable semantically enriched deductions about the spatiotemporal and purely temporal relationships which fundamentally link such archaeological data together.

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): 32003