Publication details
Neřízené modely typologické klasifikace archeologických artefaktů
| Title in English | Unsupervised models for typological classiification of archaeological artefacts |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The classification of flanged axes dated to the middle Bronze Age is very complex. Many types of axes exist, and most of them are composed by numerous variants. For example, in the recent and well-established French terminology, those axes are represented by two generic groups: namely "atlantic" and “oriental” forms. Both groups are nevertheless very polymorph so that it is often very difficult to classify the individuals. It can be illustrated for example by the fact that axes of armorican tumulus type (Atlantic group) and Neyruz type (Occidental group), both consisting of number of variants, are at the first sight visually very similar. Nevertheless, those facts do not prevent archaeologists from interpreting some important questions, for example those concerning the influences of oriental type on atlantic and vice-versa. At the first stage, we aimed at checking the pertinence of the current typology at the light of a morphometric analysis based on the treatment by a closed contour approach (Elliptic Fourier Analysis) of 268 axes. As the current typological model does not explain well the structuring of axes based on the shape similarity, we proposed a new formal classification, using an unsupervised clustering and discriminant methods based on the Gaussian mixture modelling. Once this step performed, we validated this classification via a spatial distribution of findings using a multinomial scan statistics. The final step consisted in introducing new individuals (axes-ingots) of unknown membership to attribute them to the one of the newly established groups. |