ABSTRACT
The social sciences and the humanities have been generally slow in accepting and putting to profit some of the advances in technique that have been developed by other disciplines. Symbolic logic developed its proper language in the nineteenth century with the notation that was formulated by George Boole to handle sets. The application of Boole's system made the Aristotelian syllogism into just a special case of a variety of logical algebra. In archaeology, the use of set theory was first suggested by Clarke for the definition and description of a culture area. Vennland can be defined by several ecological variables and the superposition on them of artefact distributions which can be taken as culture traits. The problem was that of obtaining a taxonomy for some seventy-eight sites in a sequence from Classic to Postclassic and the correlation of types obtained with phases and sub-regional divisions.
