 I would like to present to you a formalized approach to establish the archaeological, theoretical framework, the spatial archaeology, which enabled us to extract new archaeological information from evidence on settlement data. So just a short line out, I will first talk about the data and the motivation why we started to do this research, something on what I understand or when I talk about spatial archaeology, what it is. Then I talk about space as a chronological marker, how we can use space to tell us something about time, about the modeling itself, the algorithmic modeling, and then a brief look at the results and possible interpretation. So first our data, I worked or we worked with the data mostly from field walking, which took place over a period of 20 years by the archaeological institute of the Czech Academy of Science and covered more than 1,000 square kilometers, 8,294 hectare squares were walked and produced almost 15,000 pieces of pottery. This data was further filtered because we are only interested for now in the agricultural prehistory, so from the linear pottery culture to the migration period and also at some point in the process we added data from excavations to enrich, I will explain why shortly. So we were working with 3,669 hectare squares actually containing fines, not counting the ones with negative fines. So to give you an idea about it, this is just part of the dataset, the largest one. On the left you see data from field walking, you see it's quite densely covered, it's about 600 square kilometers, and this was then further enriched with excavation data because the excavation data provides us with more precise dating. So this is a zoomed in view, and you can see that the triangles there are data from excavations, there are not many, or they are scattered because of course the nature of the excavations, how they take place, and then you have data from surface survey and you see only some of the points are more precisely dated, so mostly it's a time slice from the early Bronze Age, most of the data is just dated like prehistory, so it's a non-diagnostic pottery, but near good spatial coverage, and we were wondering since the people at the institute were doing so much work to collect all this data, if we can do something meaningful and what we wanted to see was where the actual settlements were, and that's where, or the settlement course, that's where spatial archaeology comes into play, so okay, we wanted to reconstruct the prehistoric settlement landscape, or where the sites were, the theory of community areas formulated by Efren Neustupni says that human occupation of the landscape is structured into settlement areas which are very predictable, so we have a habitation area, so where the houses are surrounded by areas of different activities, out of which for us mostly the agricultural activities are interested, Dagmar Dressler further elaborated on that and based on different sources of evidence, archaeological and ethnographical specified limits for this agricultural production area around the settlement, how large it should be, and that's our starting point, so we know that some of those areas covered in archaeological field that they most probably are not just one settlement which was very, very large, we know that there's the course somewhere, there's the production areas somewhere there and that they somehow developed in time, but it didn't just happen in one point in prehistory, so we used this algorithmic model, which I will show you shortly, to assign the observed evidence of residential activities, which is the shirts you find in the field, to habitation areas and then model the production areas around them and to model it so, to assign them to the phases so that those settlement cores do not overlap, so because they need to respect each other, so and then on this, such the model created in this way, we analyzed using a heuristic analysis approach, which involves creating sufficient amount of statistically relevant sample of possible scenarios and which you can then express in a probabilistic way, so an example, so let's say we have some settlement evidence distributed in hectare squares and let's say we found some evidence of settlement and the dating suggests that it's just one phase, let's say it's early Bronze Age, but what we can do is model the production areas around those habitation areas, so we do that and we see that the production areas overlap, so it's an indication that they cannot be contemporary according to our theory, so that's a chronological marker, so we can construct possible scenarios where those areas do not overlap, so one scenario, another one, another one, so that would mean it's actually there has to be at least three settlement phases, but we can further reduce this result because we are looking for the most simple explanation, so we can just reduce it to those two scenarios which sufficiently describe our observation in light of the theory and we see that there were a minimum of two settlement phases, so using this approach and thanks to the meta-centrum which is a grid computing center which is available for free to all the academic institutions in the Czech Republic, we are able to calculate this model for the whole area and to create sufficient number of solutions of this phasing, you can see the different solution for just one phase cycling, so of course we do not know the sequence in which those phases were happening, but we know the number of the phases and we can explore this solution space in a probabilistic way, so here you see the expression of these many scenarios in one probabilistic distribution map, so one thing we were able to extract from the result is the stability, suddenly we saw in the data in those large areas we saw something like a course where the settlement would always return, so we were able to calculate a habitation stability index based on the ratio of observation of settlement in a square and how likely it would appear in the previous phase and we see that starting with the early Bronze Age there was an increased stability of settlement patterns, so we have something like central sites in the landscape which prevailed for hundreds of years and that's something that we suspected before but it was never formally tested or expressed in a formal way or data supported, here you can see the original data so scattered evidence and here you can see those hotspots of settlement activity in the landscape the second result or another of results we were able to achieve was to finally observe the spatial patterns, so how did the settlement behave, how did it develop over time and we used a correlation function which is a function to express a spatial clustering of data to analyze the different solutions and to quantify a degree of spatial organization so we can tell whether the settlement clusters at different radii or size levels and we see a higher order social organization appearing in the early Bronze Age and there seems to be a fluctuation of this so there's a peak of how the settlement was organized into groups on different levels in like I think it's Latte or early Iron Age or late Iron Age but this organization declines actually so even though we have this is the amount of settlements we see over time and you see the amount fluctuates but also the degree of organization so here we see the pair correlation coefficient shown for for in our country culture it's it's within the the random random limits and here in the Halstead Age in the early Iron Age we see peaks of clustering around one kilometer three kilometers so to the number they were forming structures at at different like micro regional sub regional levels and that's an that's an but but we then we see again a decline in the Roman period so it is actually as if the society was in one aspect regressing that's a that's an at least in my opinion an interesting find would be able to achieve using algorithmic modeling so I would say it's a useful tool and now we have we have the computational capacities at at our disposal to to apply and hopefully we will be able to work more in the future we are able to achieve a more detailed phase phasing of the of the data which we had available even though of course we were we do not know the order of the phases but if we use the proper probabilistic techniques we can we can analyze analyze this data on a more more detailed level and in the future we plan to to enhance our model by maybe economical or even ecological aspects they can be environmental models included probably we should we should discriminate between different or between different technological abilities of the population and different times also people with different strategies in the linear pottery culture neolithic dance and in the Bronze Age or the Roman era and also also we had to kind of close one eye when or or assume that all of the evidence we gathered was supplement evidence even though we know that there must have been some burial grounds in the data but okay we assume that on a large enough scale cemetery indicates that there must have been a settlement somewhere in the vicinity but I think it could be it could be approached and that we could we could work this into our model so that's it and thank you for