Aoristische Analyse in der Archäologie

Abstract

Among the fundamental questions that arise in landscape archaeology are those concerning the dating of sites and knowing which sites existed contemporaneously. The basic information is very heterogeneous, some sites are dated very accurately, other only approximately, depending on the character of the site. Aoristic analysis (RATCLIFFE 2000) is a method used in criminology to analyse crime incidents and determine probabilities for the contemporaneity of the incidents or, when applied to archaeology, for the contemporaneity of Sites.  The quality of the result depends on the time span during which each site could have been occupied: the longer the period in which it could have existed, the lower the probability that it existed at any one specific point within that time span and, vice versa, the more precisely a site is dated the greater the probability that it existed at a specific point in time. Exactly dated Settlements are therefore given a higher weighting, whereas sites that are imprecisely dated have a lower weighting. For archaeological purposes, the probability distribution can be at even intervals as in the aoristic analysis of crimes, or it can be proportional to the better dated sites or used to fill in "gaps".