ABSTRACT
Archaeological data are by nature spatial but also imperfect. Indeed, archaeological information is subject to uncertainty, imprecision, vagueness and incompleteness. In order to deal with that imperfection and to consider it throughout the treatment of data and spatial analyses, several uncertainty theories have been proposed in the literature. The fuzzy set theory introduced by L. A. Zadeh in 1965 considers that an element might have a partial (and gradual) membership of a set. Partial membership allows for the treatment of the Sorites Paradox and, therefore, the representation of an imprecise or vague statement. For instance, fuzzy spatial data and modelling may help in designing a model that is close to the reality of data acquisition, or be used in excavation to represent both the findspot location of an artefact and its estimated original point of deposition. It may even help in managing the uncertainty inherent to predictive modelling. This chapter will present a review of the use of fuzzy spatial modelling of archaeological data, introducing fuzzy sets theory and illustrating its use with two case studies.
