Abstrakt
The first part of the talk is aimed at the positive outcome of my study of small metal objects. I have had an opportunity to re-examine many unpublished copper finds during the writing of the book Old Kingdom Copper Tools and Model Tools and afterwards.
The slowly built expertise has enabled me to reassess some of the finds and create a meaningful explanatory framework for Old Kingdom copper model tools based on the iconographic, textual and archaeological sources. The typological study has confirmed earlier suspicions concerning the determination of full-size tools and their models.
A "grey" zone of an intermediate size between these two categories raises questions of what was and what was not a model. Moreover, fragments of full-size tools can be identified among fragmented artefacts.
I would strongly recommend preserving even tiny bits of objects until they can be seen and analysed by a specialist. In the second part of the talk, I would like to focus on a structured presentation of data and on data analysis using available proprietary software or open source software such as R.
Well into the new millennium, many scholars in the humanities still use computers only as typewriters. The unfortunate result of the present state of data formatting is that in any attempt to collect, compare and analyse data, a lot of precious time is spent to accommodate the data to the desired structure.
Within this process, moreover, many data points must be left out because of incompleteness. The possibilities of data structuring and subsequent analysis go deeper and further.
Instead of just looking for parallels, we could properly analyse statistical data and discover the structures that are "hidden" behind the objects.