Can Archaeological Models Always Fulfil our Prejudices?

The past few years have seen a significant growth in the use of quantitative models in archaeology. Such modelling has a long, albeit uneven, history, using ideas going back to Christaller’s (1933) use of Dirichlet/Voronoi tessellations of space in the early 20th century to construct ‘central places’. These elementary techniques for geometrizing social relations survived as late as the 1980s, most simply supplemented or replaced by other low-technology, ‘ruler and compass’ methods, such as Renfrew’s XTENT model (Renfrew 1975a, 1975b; Renfrew and Level 1979). By that time, archaeological modelling (e.g. Clarke 1968, 1977; Johnson 1977) was already incorporating the graph theory techniques of the social geographers, exemplified by the burgeoning network modelling of proximal point analysis (PPA) (e.g. Terrell 1977, 1986) and by the network-based spatial interaction models (SIMs) of the social planners and transport modellers (e.g. Wilson 1970; Wilson and Bennett 1986). However, even when adapted to historical processes (Rihll and Wilson 1987, 1991), such quantitative models were not part of the archaeological mainstream and limitations on computer power and cost meant that they had only restricted application. By the 1990s, these limitations were reinforced by a post-processual critique which led to a shift in emphasis in archaeology towards viewing space as a construct of human activity, a movement from ‘space to place’ (Hirsch 1995). Although SIMs had led this shift by downplaying the role of geography in characterizing social interactions, the dialogue about quantitative modelling turned against its reductive nature, even to the extent of shying away from mathematical analysis (e.g. Sheppard 2001). However, cheap computer power and the ready availability of commercial software packages have led to a revival in network methods. See Lock and Pouncett (2007) for an early overview, and for the current state of the art see Kandler and Steele (2012) and recent monographs edited by Bevan and Lake (2013) and Knappett (2013), as well as the other chapters in this book. The main focus of this article concerns the ‘retrodictive ability’ of archaeological models. In the absence of ‘laws’ of human behaviour, there is great freedom in how to proceed.