Prefazione ad Archeosema. Artificial Adaptive Systems for the Analysis of Complex Phenomena. Collected Papers in Honour of David Leonard Clarke

During the 1970s Cybernetics, introduced by D.L. Clarke in the archaeological research essentially as Systems Theory, contributed to consolidate, in the UK, in the USA and in Europe, the idea that the archaeological, linguistic and anthropological cultures work as natural organisms and that their organic-biological function could be simulated as a mechanical operation of interconnected parts, driven by an input. These parts would be able to report the whole process that caused the balance alteration, and such alteration would not be that different from those observable in the so-called cultural systems. However, this mechanisation of cultural complexity has turned the research away from other possible analogies that could contribute to resolve highly complex problems, and has especially radicalised a single meaning of complexity, as a factual dimension outside the man, a cognitive nature independent of human existence itself. But since the late 1980s, a large number of studies have been conducted in an attempt to understand the complexity of archaeological, linguistic and anthropological contexts not as being external to the human being, not as passive objects of his research, but rather as a dynamic expression of his own perceptual constructs. In this sense, this complexity has been almost subtracted from the uncontested historiographical domain of being interpreted as an external object investigable through mechanical and linear systems, and has become the subject of specigic researches that are traced back to the cognitive capacity of man to create it.