A critical aspect of analysing an archaeological site is identifying the network of relationships between the things we find and the locations where we find them. These associations are typically determined by a combination of quantitative analyses and the professional knowledge and intuition of the archaeologist, but where exactly is the boundary between what is truly empirical field data and what is inferred through our prior knowledge and field methods? How can we best support those inferences? This paper is a critical evaluation of that boundary to firmly ground, as much as possible, a quantitative analysis on only that which we can directly observe-the thing and its location-and derive associations from that basis alone. To do so, the approach described here relies on a combination of set and graph theories rather than statistical or spatial methods. This revised ontology allows a formalization, in combinatorial terms, for describing an underlying structure to contexts and assemblages that suggests a clear association between archaeological site analysis and a well-studied class of set and graph covering problems. This, in turn, points towards potential algorithmic solutions for a more holistic parsing of the total relationships between sites, contexts, assemblages, proveniences, and artefacts.

Do social norms really matter, or are they just behavioral idiosyncrasies that become associated with a group? Social norms are generally considered as a collection of formal or informal rules, but where do these rules come from, and why do we follow them? The definition for social norm varies by field of study, and how norms are established and maintained remains substantially open to questions across the behavioral sciences. In reviewing the literature on social norms across multiple disciplines, we found that the common thread appears to be information. Here, we show that norms are not merely rules or strategies, but part of a more rudimentary social process for capturing and retaining information within a social network. We have found that the emergence of norms can be better explained as an efficient system of communicating, filtering, and preserving experiential information. By reconsidering social norms and institutions in terms of information, we show that they are not merely conventions that facilitate the coordination of social behavior. They are, instead, the objective of that social coordination and, potentially, of the evolutionary adaptation of sociality itself.

Archaeologists have likely collected, as a conservative estimate, billions of artifacts over the course of the history of fieldwork. We have classified chronologies and typologies of these, based on various formal and physical characteristics or ethno-historically known analogues, to give structure to our interpretations of the people that used them. The simple truth, nonetheless, is that we do not actually know how they were used or their intended purpose. We only make inferences—i.e., educated guesses based on the available evidence as we understand it—regarding their functions in the past and the historical behaviors they reflect. Since those inferences are so fundamental to the interpretations of archaeological materials, and the archaeological project as a whole, the way we understand materiality can significantly bias the stories we construct of the past. Recent work demonstrated seemingly contradictory evidence between attributed purpose or function versus confirmed use, however, which suggested that a basic premise of those inferences did not empirically hold to be true. In each case, the apparent contradiction was resolved by reassessing what use, purpose, and function truly mean and whether certain long-established functional categories of artifacts were in fact classifying by function. The resulting triangulation, presented here, narrows the scope on such implicit biases by addressing both empirical and conceptual aspects of artifacts. In anchoring each aspect of evaluation to an empirical body of data, we back ourselves away from our assumptions and interpretations so as to let the artifacts speak for themselves.

No abstract