Title: Perches, Post-holes and Grids,
Abstract: The "Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape" project (PEML)
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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.