VANDAL: an expert system dealing with the provenance of archaeological ceramics, based on chemical, mineralogical and data analysis information

On the one hand, VANDAL produces one ‘conclusion’ (or a set of ‘conclusions’) regarding ceramic artefact provenances from the data given by the user; on the other hand, it can serve as a tool for the verification/rationalization of already established conclusions, by the virtue of its nature; production rules contained in the knowledge base of the system, readable even by a non-computer specialist, can explicitly reproduce the reasoning employed by the system in the decision-making process.