The long-running controversy over typological concept use in archaeological investigations hinges on whether such procedures introduce assumptions, and channel interpretations, in ways that can equate analytical groups with bounded cultural-historical units inappropriately. James A. Ford's writings, in reaction to the arguments of Albert Spaulding, have often been cited as the founding instance of this criticism. To illustrate his concerns, Ford drew a hypothetical village of houses and used these forms to make a number of assertions regarding the nature of artifact variability that, he felt, demonstrated inherent errors with Spaulding's artifact-analysis approach. However, despite the intense character of this controversy, both at the time and subsequently, no one appears to have tested, or confirmed, any of Ford's assertions objectively. Morphometric analyses of Ford's simulation demonstrates all published assertions of which we are aware regarding patterns of variation exhibited by these drawn artifact forms, published in the intervening 67 years, are either wholly or substantially incorrect. Both traditional and new pattern-recognition techniques allow for the identification of more fine-grained structure in artifact variation patterns than is possible using qualitative approaches. These findings argue strongly for a re-evaluation of the role of typology in archaeological research.

中文翻译：

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Ford 的 Gamma-Gamma 村模拟重新审视：强调需要一种新的考古类型中档理论1

关于考古调查中类型学概念使用的长期争议取决于此类程序是否引入了假设和渠道解释，从而将分析群体与有限的文化历史单位不恰当地等同起来。詹姆斯·A·福特( James A. Ford )的著作，作为对阿尔伯特·斯波尔丁 (Albert Spaulding) 论点的回应，经常被引用为这种批评的创始实例。为了说明他的担忧，福特画了一个假设的房屋村庄，并使用这些形式对人工制品可变性的性质做出了一些断言，他认为，这证明了斯波尔丁的固有错误。s 工件分析方法。然而，尽管这场争论非常激烈，无论是当时还是随后，似乎都没有人客观地检验或证实福特的任何断言。福特模拟的形态测量分析表明，我们所知道的所有已发表的关于这些绘制的人工制品形式所表现出的变异模式的断言，在 67 年间发表，要么完全不正确，要么实质上不正确。与使用定性方法相比，传统和新模式识别技术都允许识别人工变化模式中更细粒度的结构。这些发现强烈支持重新评估类型学在考古研究中的作用。