Duration or Cessation? Dealing with Temporal Uncertainty in the Study of Ancient Settlements

Studies of comparative urban morphology and house types are inadequate sources for the study of settlement diversity and the development of ancient sites. Visualization methods such as point pattern distribution maps are often employed to disseminate outcomes and analyse clusters but fall short of providing a good base for the study of phenomena of occupation, reoccupation and abandonment. As the following pages will try to demonstrate such tools, while useful to display data in a user-friendly and non-complicated mode, treat sites as static entities, objects unaltered and permanently existing at a precise moment in time without considering temporal variation. At a settlement level, change is only accounted for when it is documented by sudden alterations or catastrophic events that left a mark in the stratigraphic record. It is expected that an acknowledgement of the partiality of the data archaeology works with, besides an incorporation of quantitative procedures such as aoristic weighting or three-dimensional GIS, will assist in the inclusion and representation of uncertainty in archaeological models.