Formalization and Reuse of Methodological Knowledge on Archaeology across European Organizations

Cesar Gonzalez (1) , Patricia Martín-Rodilla (2) , Elena Viorica Epure (3)

1 Departamento de Fisica, Universidad de Oviedo, 33006 Oviedo, Spain
2 Institute of Heritage Science, Spanish National Research Council
3 CRI - Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Paris 1

Archaeological projects vary greatly in size, object of study, timescale and other aspects. Finding the most suitable methodology is often difficult, and an inadequate choice can ruin many months' worth of fieldwork and interpretation. An archaeological methodology should be as adjusted as possible to the project needs, consider knowledge that was successfully applied in the past, and be clearly expressed for better understanding and sharing. These goals are usually pursued informally through the application of tacit knowledge within archaeology organizations, leading to situations where it is difficult to convey what is expected to be done, methodological knowledge is underutilized and rarely reused, and the improvement of methodologies over time is difficult since no explicit knowledge about them exists. Some experiences exist with regard to using situational method engineering (SME) to mitigate these problems. In this paper we present the results of applying SME to the informal methodological knowledge of seven European archaeological organizations. Natural language processing techniques have been used to assist in this process. This work allowed us to obtain variations of established methodologies to cater for different project situations, combine different methodologies for collaborations and other hybrid scenarios, and reason about the methodological choices of different organizations.

Keywords: Methodology; Knowledge reuse; Archaeological practice; Situational method engineering; Natural language processing

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Archaeology and Prehistory

Cesar Gonzalez, Patricia Martín-Rodilla, Elena Viorica Epure. Formalization and Reuse of Methodological Knowledge on Archaeology across European Organizations. 44th Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Conference, Mar 2016, Oslo, Norway. ⟨hal-01425579⟩