Deciding Without Certainty: A Framework for Archaeological Decision Governance
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866901462990192640 |
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| author | Laing, Zachariah |
| author_facet | Laing, Zachariah |
| contents | <p>This dissertation introduces a formal decision-governance framework for archaeological practice under conditions of irreducible uncertainty. Archaeological planning—whether in survey design, excavation strategy, or heritage risk management—often requires irreversible decisions to be made before uncertainty can be resolved through additional data collection. Existing approaches tend to emphasize inference and explanation, while leaving the structure of decision-making itself largely implicit.</p> <p>To address this gap, the dissertation develops <strong>Anomalous Systems Analysis (ASA)</strong> and introduces <strong>Failure Boundary Proximity (FBP)</strong> as a governance metric for regulating action when uncertainty cannot be eliminated. Rather than predicting outcomes or reconstructing causal histories, the framework focuses on preserving corrective capacity, constraining confidence inflation, and governing escalation under correlated and incomplete information.</p> <p>The framework is validated through three complementary approaches. First, it is applied retrospectively to four historically documented decision environments—the Classic Maya, Han China, the Roman Empire, and the Abbasid Caliphate—each selected for contrasting institutional geometries and stress-response patterns. These comparative analyses demonstrate that rising Failure Boundary Proximity precedes fragmentation, redesign, or institutional hollowing across divergent systems, using only information plausibly available to historical decision-makers.</p> <p>Second, the framework is operationalized through a decision-based simulation applied to contemporary archaeological planning contexts in the United States, China, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The simulation evaluates decision behavior rather than outcomes, showing that ASA-governed planners consistently reduce escalation volatility, confidence inflation, and resource overshoot without relying on predictive assumptions or institutional recalibration.</p> <p>Finally, the dissertation demonstrates how ASA can be embedded directly into real-time archaeological practice as a procedural governance layer, complementing existing legal, ethical, and methodological standards. By shifting archaeological methodology from outcome optimization toward decision governance under uncertainty, this work contributes a bounded, non-predictive framework aimed at strengthening epistemic integrity, ethical responsibility, and institutional resilience in archaeological planning.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_18176832 |
| institution | Zenodo |
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| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | Deciding Without Certainty: A Framework for Archaeological Decision Governance Laing, Zachariah Archaeological Methodology Heritage Management <p>This dissertation introduces a formal decision-governance framework for archaeological practice under conditions of irreducible uncertainty. Archaeological planning—whether in survey design, excavation strategy, or heritage risk management—often requires irreversible decisions to be made before uncertainty can be resolved through additional data collection. Existing approaches tend to emphasize inference and explanation, while leaving the structure of decision-making itself largely implicit.</p> <p>To address this gap, the dissertation develops <strong>Anomalous Systems Analysis (ASA)</strong> and introduces <strong>Failure Boundary Proximity (FBP)</strong> as a governance metric for regulating action when uncertainty cannot be eliminated. Rather than predicting outcomes or reconstructing causal histories, the framework focuses on preserving corrective capacity, constraining confidence inflation, and governing escalation under correlated and incomplete information.</p> <p>The framework is validated through three complementary approaches. First, it is applied retrospectively to four historically documented decision environments—the Classic Maya, Han China, the Roman Empire, and the Abbasid Caliphate—each selected for contrasting institutional geometries and stress-response patterns. These comparative analyses demonstrate that rising Failure Boundary Proximity precedes fragmentation, redesign, or institutional hollowing across divergent systems, using only information plausibly available to historical decision-makers.</p> <p>Second, the framework is operationalized through a decision-based simulation applied to contemporary archaeological planning contexts in the United States, China, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The simulation evaluates decision behavior rather than outcomes, showing that ASA-governed planners consistently reduce escalation volatility, confidence inflation, and resource overshoot without relying on predictive assumptions or institutional recalibration.</p> <p>Finally, the dissertation demonstrates how ASA can be embedded directly into real-time archaeological practice as a procedural governance layer, complementing existing legal, ethical, and methodological standards. By shifting archaeological methodology from outcome optimization toward decision governance under uncertainty, this work contributes a bounded, non-predictive framework aimed at strengthening epistemic integrity, ethical responsibility, and institutional resilience in archaeological planning.</p> |
| title | Deciding Without Certainty: A Framework for Archaeological Decision Governance |
| topic | Archaeological Methodology Heritage Management |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18176832 |