In this section, we will consider archaeological textures as the archaeological element’s surface attributes having either tactile or visual variety, which characterize its appearance. The surfaces of archaeological objects, artifacts, and materials are not uniform but contain many variations; some of them are of visual or tactile nature. Such variations go beyond the peaks and valleys characterizing surface micro-topography, which is the obvious frame of reference for “textures” in usual speaking. Archaeological materials have variations in the local properties of their surfaces like albedo and color variations, uniformity, density, coarseness, roughness, regularity, linearity, directionality, frequency, phase, hardness, brightness, bumpiness, specularity, reflectivity, transparency, and so on. Texture is the name we give to the perception of these variations. What we are doing here is introducing a synonym for “perceptual variability” or “surface discontinuity.” It is a kind of perceptual information complementing shape information.
In Defense of the Populist Lecture
