Ambiguous landscapes: A framework for assessing robustness and uncertainties in archaeological point pattern analysis

Landscape research in archaeology has greatly benefited from the increasing application of computational methods over the last decades. Spatial statistical methods such as point pattern analysis have been particularly revolutionary. Archaeologists have used point pattern analysis to explore spatial arrangements and relations between 'points' (e.g., locations of artefacts or archaeological sites). However, the results obtained from these techniques can be greatly affected by the uncertainty coming from the fragmentary nature of archaeological data, their irregular distribution in the landscape, and the working methods used to study them. Furthermore, the quantification of uncertainty in spatial data coming from non-systematic surveys has never been fully addressed. To overcome this challenge, archaeologists have increasingly relied on applying advanced methods from statistics, data science, and geography. While the application of advanced methods from formal sciences will provide robustness to models based on uncertain datasets, as with uncertainty, robustness must be assessed in relation to the case study, the regional context, and the methods used. These issues are of great importance when the models from advanced methods are directly used to create narratives about past landscapes. In this paper, we gather previous research on uncertainty quantification in archaeology and formalize its best practices into a framework to assess robustness and uncertainty in spatial statistical models, particularly focusing on one commonly used in the discipline, i.e., the Pair Correlation Function. This framework allows us to understand better how incomplete data affect a model, quantify the model uncertainties, and assess the robustness of the results achieved with spatial point processes.