Typology (archaeology)
Encyclopedia
In archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 a typology is the result of the classification
Categorization
Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge...

 of things according to their characteristics. The products of the classification, i.e. the classes are also called types. Most archaeological typologies organize artifacts
Artifact (archaeology)
An artifact or artefact is "something made or given shape by man, such as a tool or a work of art, esp an object of archaeological interest"...

 into types, but typologies of houses or roads belonging to a certain culture may be set up as well. A typology helps to manage a large mass of archaeological data. According to Doran and Hodson (1975, p. 158), "this superficially straightforward task has proved one of the most time consuming and contentious aspects of archaeological research".

Philosophical background

Typology is based on a view of the world familiar from Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

 called essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...

. Essentialism is the idea that world is divided into real, discontinuous and immutable ‘kinds’. This idea is the basis for most typological constructions, particularly of stone artefacts where essential forms are often thought of as ‘mental templates’, or combinations of traits that are favoured by the maker. Variation in artifact form and attributes is seen as a consequence of the imperfect realization of the template, and is usually attributed to differences in raw material properties or individuals' technical competences.

History

Although the principles were not clearly articulated, the application of basic typological techniques can occasionally be found in the work of early modern
Early modern period
In history, the early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions...

 antiquaries
Antiquarian
An antiquarian or antiquary is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient objects of art or science, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts...

. As early as the 1530s, John Leland successfully identified Roman bricks
Roman brick
Roman brick can refer either to a type of brick originating in Ancient Rome and spread by the Romans to the lands they conquered; or to a modern type of brick, inspired by the ancient prototypes...

 (under the misleading designation "Briton brykes") at several different sites, distinguishing them from more modern bricks by size and shape. Antiquaries began to recognise in the late sixteenth century that medieval monumental effigies represented with their legs crossed were likely to be older than those with straight legs. In the late seventeenth century, John Aubrey
John Aubrey
John Aubrey FRS, was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the collection of short biographical pieces usually referred to as Brief Lives...

 worked out crude evolutionary sequences based on typological distinctions for medieval architecture, handwriting, shield-shapes and costume. The outline of the development of medieval Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....

 was further refined in the eighteenth century, culminating in the clear sequence of styles published by Thomas Rickman
Thomas Rickman
Thomas Rickman , was an English architect who was a major figure in the Gothic Revival.He was born at Maidenhead, Berkshire, into a large Quaker family, and avoided the medical career envisaged for him by his father, a grocer and druggist; he went into business for himself and married his first...

 in 1817.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries archaeological typologies continued to be constructed using a combination of empirical observation and intuition. According to Eggers, most archaeologists give Oscar Montelius
Oscar Montelius
Oscar Montelius was a Swedish archaeologist who refined the concept of seriation, a relative chronological dating method...

 the credit for the first serious application of the typological method, but in Eggers' view, his contemporary colleague from Stockholm, Hans Hildebrand made important contributions to the development of the methodology as well. Hildebrand published a fundamental paper on the development of fibulae in the 1870s using the typological method, whereas Montelius at the same time went to international congresses and published smaller papers on this method.

Another early example is the typology published in 1899 by Flinders Petrie for the objects (mainly pottery) found in 900 prehistoric Egyptian graves. This typology formed the basis for his manual seriation
Seriation (archaeology)
In archaeology, seriation is a relative dating method in which assemblages or artifacts from numerous sites, in the same culture, are placed in chronological order. Where absolute dating methods, such as carbon dating, cannot be applied, archaeologists have to use relative dating methods to date...

 of the graves.

Statistical methods for creating a typology

With the development of statistical
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 techniques and numerical taxonomy
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...

 in the 1960s, mathematical methods (including Cluster analysis, Principal components analysis
Principal components analysis
Principal component analysis is a mathematical procedure that uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into a set of values of uncorrelated variables called principal components. The number of principal components is less than or equal to...

, correspondence analysis
Correspondence analysis
Correspondence analysis is a multivariate statistical technique proposed by Hirschfeld and later developed by Jean-Paul Benzécri. It is conceptually similar to principal component analysis, but applies to categorical rather than continuous data...

 and Factor analysis
Factor analysis
Factor analysis is a statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved, uncorrelated variables called factors. In other words, it is possible, for example, that variations in three or four observed variables...

) have been used to build typologies. During the 1990s archaeologists began to use phylogenetic methods borrowed from Cladistics
Cladistics
Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...

.

Ceramic Typology

For cultures that produced pottery, archaeologists invariably spend a great deal of time defining ceramic "types." Each type is a series of attributes which distinguishes one group of pottery (whether whole vessels or potsherds) from all other groups of pottery, such that each type was produced in a single time and place. Ideally, the attributes used to identify types are ones that are identifiable with the naked eye, and are found on small fragments of pottery, so that the sorting of potsherds into types is quick and straightforward. By sorting potsherds in terms of types, archaeologists can examine a series of potsherds (including those lying on a site surface) and quickly suggest when and where the pottery was made. By extension, they can estimate when a prehistoric site was used, whether there are any traded pieces, and so on.

The names assigned to the ceramic types are arbitrary. In the New World, the common practice is a two-part name, the first part being an arbitrary geographic reference and the second part providing a brief description of the pottery's most obvious design attributes. Thus, for example, the type "Flagstaff Black-on-white" was first defined using a collection from the vicinity of Flagstaff, Arizona, and its primary design attribute is the use of black paint on a white background.

Non-archaeologists should be aware of the limitations of ceramic typology. All such typologies are abstractions, and fail to describe all of the variability in an artistic tradition. Professional disagreement over specifics is common. Changes in ceramic design did not happen overnight, and archaeological typologies tend to break continua of design evolution into arbitrary (but highly useful) units. Most archaeological dates are approximate.

Non-archaeological typology as an art form

In the middle of the twentieth century, German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernard "Bernd" Becher , and Hilla Becher, née Wobeser , were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures.- Biography :Bernd Becher was born in Siegen...

raised typology to an art form by photographing countless similar architectural features including water towers, workers' houses and industrial landscapes. They documented their work in books.
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