Archaeologists all over the world face problems regarding complexity and disorganization. Whether surveying, excavating, or doing laboratory analysis, the nature of the evidence of prehistoric societies is fragmented and incomplete. On a global and very general basis, the older the site, the greater the fragmentation, the more the missing data, and the greater the disorganization that the archaeologist must navigate to understand the past. Of course, there are notable exceptions. Most archaeologists consider the topic from the specificity of a particular time, a particular place, and a particular society. In this paper, it is considered in its most non-particular and general format. In order to do so, the paper creates an artificial archaeological region that is surveyed and excavated to a greater and lesser extent and analyzed with a variety of statistical and graphic evaluations. It concludes that when all other things are equal, increasing fragmentation causes far more disorganization and increases complexity than does missing data. Thus, fragmentation is a far more important problem for archaeological interpretation than relatively small amounts of missing data.

世界各地的考古学家都面临着复杂性和无组织性的问题。无论是勘察、发掘还是进行实验室分析，史前社会的证据本质上都是支离破碎、不完整的。从全球范围和非常普遍的角度来看，遗址越古老，碎片化程度就越高，缺失的数据就越多，考古学家为了了解过去而必须驾驭的混乱程度也就越严重。当然，也有明显的例外。大多数考古学家从特定时间、特定地点和特定社会的特殊性来考虑这个话题。在本文中，它被认为是最非特定和一般的格式。为此，本文创建了一个人工考古区域，对其进行了或多或少的调查和挖掘，并通过各种统计和图形评估进行了分析。结论是，当所有其他条件相同时，与丢失数据相比，碎片化的增加会导致更多的混乱并增加复杂性。因此，对于考古学解释来说，碎片化是一个比相对少量的缺失数据更重要的问题。