On the coding of archaeological finds

The problem of coding archaeological finds is discussed. The different items susceptible to coding are described according to the kind of information that must be collected. Some new coding techniques are described in particular: the landmarks technique, to be used for the shape analysis of corpora of finds all having a similar shape; the textual coding, useful for the study of images, once both the elements and attitudes and the sub-images composing the image are taken into account; a symbolic coding, to be used in the study of the syntactical structure of the images, describing the relations among items, regardless of the iconographical content. An overview of the exploratory analysis issues is given as conclusion