Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The year 2019 marks the 30th anniversary of the landmark volume "Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology" (Leonard and Jones 1989, Cambridge University Press). Over the past 30 years, in part due to Leonard and Jones' (1989) book, as well as increased collaboration with ecologists and statisticians, archaeologists' understanding and application of concepts of diversity in material culture, genetics, human behavior, and other arenas of investigation has expanded immensely. In this symposium, researchers representing a wide array of time periods, geographic locations, and artifact types provide methodological and theoretical case studies of measuring diversity, and what the understanding of diversity means for archaeologists' interpretations of human technology, behavior, and evolution.