ABSTRACT
This chapter considers current theoretical approaches to point distributions, and subsequent sections then address three case studies that highlight some important conceptual issues and new analytical opportunities. Temporal uncertainty is an elephant in the room of much archaeological interpretation. Much of the variability in our observed spatial patterns in archaeology is due to patchy levels of archaeological preservation and investigation. It is a near ubiquitous feature of archaeological datasets, whether these are radiocarbon dates, geo archaeological deposits, or individual artifacts. This choice of area is deliberate: it reduces the range of complicating factors both because it was investigated in a fairly even way by a single archaeological project and because it covers an area of generally consistent underlying geology. Two key methodological advances over the last 35 years have been methods that deliberately seek to address point pattern and process at several different spatial scales and employ a family of randomization tests known as Monte Carlo simulation.
