Book Review: "Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis in archaeological computational modeling" edited by Marieka Briuwer Burg, Hans Peeters, William A. Lovis

This volume is collection of papers emerging from a forum at the 2014 SAA meetings. The papers are motivated by the question of how we can measure and interpret uncertainty in quantitative archaeological models, specifically by using sensitivity analysis. The types of models discussed in this volume include geo-referenced models of past environments to infer hunter-gather land use, and agent-based models of cultural transmission processes. They explore various sources of uncertainty, and implement sensitivity analysis by assessing how the output of the models varies according to changes in the inputs. The motivation for this collection is the editors' observations that archaeologists lack a discipline-based protocol for testing models.