Dealing with Vagueness in Archaeological Discourses

Vagueness is an intriguing topic, especially in the humanities. It has been treated as a problem that contaminates information and makes researcher harder, but also as an expression of human subjectivity that enriches our accounts of the world. Vagueness is studied by philosophers, treated by computer scientists, and used by archaeologists intentionally or unintentionally. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive overview of how vagueness has been treated from philosophy and computer science, and offer a synthetic theoretical framework to operationalise vagueness on archaeological discourses that can be applied for practical purposes. To illustrate this, an empirical study is described.

Vagueness in everywhere, and archaeology is no exception. From quantitative measurements or datings to uncertain function or use assessments, archaeologists deal with imprecise, inaccurate and uncertain information all the time. In addition, vagueness is strongly embedded in language. Human language contains a number of mechanisms to express vagueness, such as hedges (“approximately”, “might”) or ranges (“between 12 and 15”). This means that any archaeological discourse is likely to employ devices like these to describe relevant information.

In addition, vagueness is a computational challenge. Common representations of knowledge that are stored on computer systems discard vagueness, thus losing nuance and richness. Computer scientists have tried to incorporate these aspects into data through approaches such as fuzzy logic or protoforms, which provide richer accounts of what is being represented, but at the cost of higher complexity.

This chapter begins with a philosophical introduction to vagueness, and then it describes how vagueness has been treated from computer science. Then, a vagueness framework is proposed based on the previous, and an empirical study is described to illustrate practical applications.

Discourse. Vagueness. Uncertainty. Imprecision. Inaccuracy. Error. Archaeology.