Abstract
Abstract
In this paper I investigate the possibilities and limitations of fractal analysis methods applied to archaeological and synthetic settlement plans, with the goal of providing quantitative measures of spatial randomness or noise, as well as potential tools for automated culture-historical attribution of settlement plans and socio-economic intra-site differentiation. The archaeological sample is made from Linear Pottery settlements in south-west Slovakia and Trypillia settlements in the Southern Bugh-Dnipro interfluve in central Ukraine, all based upon high quality geomagnetic site plans. Synthetic plans are constructed as geometrically ideal versions of the archaeological ones, with varying degrees of added spatial noise. A significant correlation between fractal dimension and noise level is revealed for synthetic settlement plans, independently of size, density, house-size distribution and basic layout. However, several methodological challenges persist, and further systematic exploration on larger samples is needed before these results may be generalised. All analysis is performed in the R language and the script is made freely available in order to facilitate further development.
Publisher
Research Square Platform LLC
Reference61 articles.
1. Allain, C., & Cloitre, M. (1991). Characterizing the lacunarity of random and deterministic fractal sets. Physical Review A, 44(6), 3552–3558. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.44.3552
2. Batty, M. (2005). Cities and complexity: Understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals. MIT Press.
3. Batty, M., & Longley, P. (1994). Fractal Cities—A Geometry of Form and Function. Academic Press.
4. Brown, C., & Liebovitch, L. (2010). Fractal Analysis. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412993876
5. Brown, C. T., Witschey, W. R., & Liebovitch, L. S. (2005). The Broken past: Fractals in Archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 12(1), 37–78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-005-2396-6