Fuzzy Logic Application to Artifact Surface Survey Data 2 . Fuzziness in Chronological Attribution

Survey archaeologists, studying human activities over space during time, need to assign a chronological framework to their field data and consequently produce maps showing sites and their chronology, determined mainly by the cultural material. Specialists who assign chronological attributions, have difficulties with rigid chronological categories, and tend to create additional ones, in order to match their data. Moreover, they face materials with uncertain, or multiple chronology, and end up with large chronological ranges. Survey archaeologists need to extract meanings out of those data and, using traditional classification methods, are forced to reduce those classes into fewer, and often not representative of the surface data. We propose to use a fuzzy logic approach in order to give data more transparency and to present a more realistic map, according to the real nature of the data. 1