ABSTRACT
For purposes of identifying types of artifacts, quantitative dimensions require different (Shott 2003) and more complex analytical methods than qualitative and bifurcated dimensions. The complexity stems from the combination of (1) not all the possible quantitative dimensions of an artifact are culturally salient and (2) even for a culturally salient dimension, there will be variation arising from the fact that the value for a dimension need not be mapped in an identical manner onto each artifact. For quantitative dimensions, patterning relevant to type definitions is therefore based on “patterning in the aggregate” and takes into account all the values measured over a collection of comparable objects. But what constitutes comparable objects is not immediately self-evident and can lead to a double bind when using quantitative dimensions to identify artifact types—hence, the increased analytical complexity.
