2017/04/24 by Clair Barnes, Barnes, Clair, Wilfrid S. Kendall +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #62P99 #Applications (stat.AP) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Land Use and Ecosystem Services #Tree-ring climate responses
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1704.07342
openalex publication_date 2017/04/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The "Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape" project (PEML) , funded by the Leverhulme Trust, has organized and collated a substantial quantity of images, and has used this as evidence to support the hypothesis that Anglo-Saxon building construction was based on grid-like planning structures based on fixed modules or quanta of measurement. We report on the development of some statistical contributions to the debate concerning this hypothesis. In practice the PEML images correspond to data arising in a wide variety of different forms. It does not seem feasible to produce a single automatic method which can be applied uniformly to all such images; even the initial chore of cleaning up an image (removing extraneous material such as legends and physical features which do not bear on the planning hypothesis) typically presents a separate and demanding challenge for each different image. Moreover care must be taken, even in the relatively straightforward cases of clearly defined ground-plans (for example for large ecclesiastical buildings of the period), to consider exactly what measurements might be relevant. We report on pilot statistical analyses concerning three different situations. These establish not only the presence of underlying structure (which indeed is often visually obvious), but also provide an account of the numerical evidence supporting the deduction that such structure is present. We contend that statistical methodology thus contributes to the larger historical debate and provides useful input to the wide and varied range of evidence that has to be debated.