CAA/SSLA session at CAA 2026, Vienna (S16)
Organised by Joe Roe and Matteo Tomasini
When: 2026-04-02,08:30-10:10 CEST
Where: Hörsaal 05, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Description
Box’s oft-quoted law—”all models are wrong, but some are useful” (Box 1976)—tells us that the value of a model is not in precisely reproducing the real world, but failing to do so in a productive way. This is nowhere truer than in computational archaeology, the search for mathematical approximations of a fundamentally unreproducible past. We are voracious producers and consumers of new digital methods, tools, and perspectives (Scollar 1999; Batist and Roe 2024). It is only to be expected that most of these end up going nowhere. Yet only successful models tend to make it into conferences and publications; the lessons we learn from ‘failed’ attempts are kept private. In this session, we call for papers on: models that failed verification, or turned out to be unverifiable; new approaches tried that didn’t work; errors in implementation, large and small; methods and tools that have been left on the wayside; and any other form of failure in computational archaeological research.
Presentations
Can ecological models predict the occurrence of species in the archaeological record? Can I? Joe Roe
The rise and fall (and rise again?) of cultural phylogenetics in archaeology Felix Riede
Beyond the Signals: A simulation-based evaluation of the Signal Selection Test (SST) Alberto Cooper and Enrico Crema
The Data Strikes Back: Overcoming Challenges in Quantitative Approaches to the Roman Settlement Landscape Mark Groenhuijzen, Andrew Lawrence, Philip Verhagen
References
Batist, Z. & Roe, J., 2024. Open archaeology, open source? Collaborative practices in an emerging community of archaeological software engineers. Internet Archaeology 67. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.67.13
Box, G. E. P. 1976. Science and Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association 71: 791–799. https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1976.10480949
Scollar, I. 1999. 25 Years of computer applications in archaeology. In L. Dingwall, S. Exon, V. Gaffney, S. Laflin and M. van Leusen (eds.) Archaeology in the Age of the Internet. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 5-10. https://proceedings.caaconference.org/paper/02_scollar_caa_1997/
