Towards a formalisation of spatio-temporal relationships in chronometric databases
Igor Bogdanović, Capuzzo Giacomo, Berta Morell, Juan Antonio Barceló Àlvarez
Abstract In this paper we address the possible ways to manage and explain spatio-temporal information to reconstruct the duration of historical events. The way in which we represent absolute dating and the formalisms that describe the stratigraphic relationships and spatial coordinates, have a great impact on how historical knowledge is constructed. In this paper we found a database model for radiocarbon dated and georeferenced archaeological contexts and findings, and we analyse the languages and notations, i.e. studying vocabularies, conceptualizations, ontologies and relationships. The paper is based on previous team-work on databases of radiocarbon dated archaeological contexts: Prehistory of Northeastern Iberian Peninsula (http://www.mac.cat/eng/ Research/Catalunya-C14), Bronze Age of Southwestern Europe (the EUBAR - Capuzzo 2014) and other relevant case studies (Bogdanovic et al. 2013, Morell et al., in press.). To create an integrated data base in which chronometric dating of isotopic events are related with the archaeological contexts, we propose data model based on the inference chain: Isotopic event Depositional event Archaeological event Historical event. In this way, each isotope event is related with its corresponding depositional events taking into account stratigraphic and taphonomic information of each dated sample. Defining context reliability is a fundamental step for obtaining a true relation between the radiocarbon probability intervals and the depositional event we are referring to. A particular logical connection should be found within the isotopically determined calendar dates of all determinable death events within the same depositional event. The estimated calendar date and duration of all depositional events within the same archaeological event will be used to measure the date and duration of events higher in the hierarchy. The calculated calendar date and duration of all archaeological events within a single historical event should be used to compute an estimation of the initial and final position of events within the historical period.
