 where I'm writing me. So I'm going to talk about, I'm sorry it's lots of theory and methods, but I, so I was placed in the methods section, so I hope that's appropriate. So I will talk about how you could statistically think about function in archeological contexts, and as well as how we today apply geospatial models and the ideas that we have behind them. So, well, why actually, well, so I work on landfill culture, which is the predecessor to the Iron Age in Central Europe, and there are fortified hilltop settlements as well as lowland settlements, and it has always been a big question about the function of these hilltop settlements and ideas have been proposed to see them as a sort of book, so, which would roughly translate as castle. And the reason why we do that is because some have proposed ones that social structure and power relations are projected to space. Then we think about this very influential paper on the research in fortified hilltop settlements where Jochenhoof was stated that these are centers of economic, political power, and also be possibly cultic. But the point is, while this paper sums up the evidence that he had at the time, it's still these assumptions of what these settlements do are basically just based on the theory, because we have no written evidence, so we just think about it, and if we wanna go on with statistics, we have to actually take this approach, which is kind of in a lot of sciences, but this is especially from economics, and it deals with the measurement of the intangible, and it actually leads us to the fact that we have to clarify what we mean by, let's say, economic center or power relations, and we also, which is really important for model building and predictive modeling, have to decide why do we even care? So it's not just to say, well, I look at if there's something, we also have to decide why we want to know, and we have to establish this protocol, and if we publish, we also have to publish why we got to certain variables, and why we made these assumptions. So I just summed up these things, and thought about, well, what do we actually mean by that? And these are some general archeological ideas. They are obviously other ones, and depending on to which theoretical background or theories you like, you might name different things. So for economic power, most often, imported goods as a settlement of how much surplus do you have in order to get the fancy stuff from far away are mentioned. Then people think about what constitutes a high status or a prestigious object, and usually for the Bronze Age, they came out with weapons and gold. Then there's always the close proximity of the settlements to rich barriers, the presence of different social things in the area, and that's more about the surrounding or what you can find in objects, but if you look at the political stuff, which does obviously not really translate in any object, we also find metallurgy is often stated, as one of the primary factors, then the geopolitically important position, like being on top and looking around, having control about the environment, and presence of large building structures which would allow you to have a gathering and people come together and discuss or being ruled or whatever, and then we have, well, obviously, elevated location because we're talking about hillfort settlements, so there people think about this has to have a reason, and which is really often discussed as fortification, which does occur, but I have to admit the point is most often these fortifications have never been dated, and we know from specific sites like the Heineburg that some of them are much older than we thought, and we know from other ones that they are much younger than we previously thought, so we have to think about, I'm sorry, this in a sense of how could we access this, so why do we care about it is one, well, so what we mean is one thing, but why do we care is usually related to a theoretical framework, and this theoretical framework has changed a lot over the last hundred years, and each paradigm shift in archeology has also resulted in different approaches to these theoretical frameworks, which means our interpretation is much guided by basically how old we are, so in which theoretically framework we grew up with in archeology, what models we like, and so they have been used from like Marxist to near evolutionary ones, you probably all know them, and it's currently has led us to think about geospatial things as not a new paradigm, but a shift in our old paradigm of post-perceptural archeology, and usually if you ask people, so why do you care about these settlements, and why do you care of the stuff I previously mentioned, they mention most often the centrality factors by a Greenwood Dalma, which have been established for early medieval times, which have fortification, political power, specialist craftsmanship, and a religious center, which as you might see corresponds pretty well to what we have previously, then there's several place theory, it's an old one, but it's still very popular in trying to find out whether these hill forts have like a central role, so it's often used, then we just have the presence of different burial attire and different sites around our hill forts, and in general, so we believe these differences have to sort of be a difference in social status however you want to define it, and I don't want to go into the status prestige discussion here, but just assume it's differing social status, then complex technology is very often associated with the need of a complex society, so while there's obviously other people who said, and this is true, you don't need a complex hierarchical society in order to achieve complex technological things like large-scale mining and metal production, but it's a common theory to assume it has to be the case, then obviously location means you could theoretically, if you wish to, control the landscape that surrounds you, which puts you in lack of trade and taxes and all these things in a really good position, well then obviously in your center, people believe the elite should be living there because the people from the barriers need to live somewhere, and obviously they want to live in this elevated location which has all the different services or whatever, and sadly for Earnfield culture, there's something this reason to say, well all these hierarchy and these like developed things that you see in the early Iron Age with the first and Zitzer, so there's principally seeds like the Heineburg, or Weeks, or many other ones, they have to have a predecessor, they are not coming out of nothing, and we see like the start of using Hillfords in House.A2B1, so this is like their predecessor, which is really sad because it always turns up in Iron Age publications, and then you're like, but you have to say why you believe in that. So I thought about, well so in theory we are interested in measuring function, and function is something that's called an intangible variable like creativity because it's not physically present, it's not something you can just go around and measure. So I look to management studies and other statistical studies and they say, well basically in the universal theory that if you look at something, it has to exist in whatever amount and everything that exists in an amount can be measured, but the point is how we define a measurement. So I very much adhere to this thing which is also very present in physics and quantum mechanics, measurement is just a state of uncertainty reduction, it does not mean that you have a definite answer, neither does it mean that you know exactly how it changed, it just means you know more than you did previously. Well then, it is said that a matterful variable, everything that matters have to have observable consequences because it would not, if it would not it wouldn't be there. And it's also usually that, like it's not a larger amount of things that matter a lot, but a small amount of things so we need to find them. And the third one is a statistical full of thinking, this is bias and not fissure, it's how you treat uncertainty of your measurements and I very much like to go with the fact that this is a feature of the observer and not the thing I observe. So this is just for how I approach it, you could do it obviously differently. So I wish to use these two quotes because I think they're very influential and Clark has influenced part of my work and it's the fact that we see theory in things that are just bad samples so we have to be sure about that and this is a critique from the famous paper about perceptual archeology and the radical critique and it says that archeology has like the optimism that everything could be recovered if you search hard enough and I think that's in some way true for the current modeling approach because we just try to model things where if we would be honest don't actually have enough factors to do so. So well obviously it's not good if you just ranked about what could be done differently so I thought and I thought that as spatial autocorrelation is a big problem we should look as an indicator of function function which is not directly influenced by how good people pick stuff up because most of my findings are actually based from local collectors who just walk around so obviously they will look to like pottery of decoration and not just everything because you can't date and feel pottery that has no decoration, it's really hard if it's out of context because it looks very similar to the iron age. So I looked at these sites, this is central Svabianal and I classified sites based on the data set which has been published in 2007 but it's actually from 1980 and I have to admit that Derunderberg by Badoura and the Heineburg are not in the sample because they're the only two ones which were excavated and they just dominate and obscure everything that is present in the rest of these and more than 300 sites so they have to wait because it's ongoing research and we see that bowls which are the shine are the most common form in the Anfield culture and I just wish to point out that we see differences in the levels that they occur and they are most important thing in burials and we also see that the difference in hilltop settlements is smaller than in lowland settlements so this is something really important and I just want you to keep it in mind because if you look at how is this pottery like we find in course pottery as ceramics how is it distributed? We also see differences which are really interesting because these small bowls are usually made out of fine ware so it's really interesting to see this variation but the point is although I cannot tell you it's really interesting I also have to admit I have no idea what it means but we see that there are slight differences but we will just have to conduct further research because if we look at graphitized pottery which is in general seen as a status indicator because it's quite complex to generate it we see that usually that's mostly in bowls which also might tell you something about the fact that all these results are just prone to the fact that they have more bowls in hilltop settlements than in any other site which is of course interesting but on the other side I also have to admit this is the only materiality function I have so far I'm currently working on a pottery estimate for like the technique it was burned like but we don't have the results yet so just keep in mind this is the thing we can deduct from the material there's actually no differences in metal so these are all the sites I use the yellow ones are all the settlements the gray area are other types of findings so there's the Heineberg stuff that will be on top of the map so it's not on there and what you can basically see will tell you maybe I should apply geospatial statistics well the point is I didn't do so because well I will later but actually it's not informative to do it right now because this pattern is probably just influenced by autocorrelation because essentially my pattern looks sort of like this I have large gray areas where I don't know what was going on and there's no systematic sampling going on so basically if I look at this I could say well obviously there's the river so I have this large mega site and like specialist craftsmanship and everything going on but the point is and like sacred landscape my art pattern could also look like this which is completely different but would be possible so these easy access models of kernel densities and stuff like that are probably not likely to give us good ideas and examples because they're usually very environmentally deterministic because I look at ah this site has better stuff so probably it has to be there they lack human agency and human make irrational decisions all the time people have focused to like the landscape of ancestors and we can't include that right now so we have to like just think about it so sorry for the fast run for these are my conclusions well I thought that actually indicators of function and comparing sites with each other can be metaphor variables that can lead together with spatial data to a reduction of uncertainty which leads me to the fact that we have sort of an example data set which allows us for hypothesis testing and we have better understanding if you look closely which statistical methods we can apply the point is if you look at the data set we still have to actually just acknowledge that we just don't understand what we see we see differences and obviously there are things going on but we need a theoretical framework in geospatial data because otherwise or in archeological modeling in general because otherwise we just don't know what to do I can't tell you what the stuff of the Baals means because well I have to look into it and think about it but I think we need a less naive approach to geospatial statistics in archeology and not just throw them at our data and hope they will tell us something about interaction or whatever and I strongly believe that my further investigation of this like just started a project of mine we could actually get to something about what the site functions meant so thank you and if you have any questions I'm very happy to answer them