Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Statistical data modeling is fundamental to archaeological inquiry. This type of modeling is applicable to all research questions, and serves to evaluate how well archaeological observations support theoretical expectations. Pioneering archaeological questions, however, are not always answerable with standard techniques – requiring development of innovative modeling methods. The purpose of this symposium is to exhibit the range of cutting-edge analytical techniques advanced to evaluate novel archaeological hypotheses. Symposium participants answer groundbreaking archaeological hypotheses regarding cultural variability by developing or adapting a wide range of analytical modeling methods derived from computational, mathematical, spatial, statistical, and graphical approaches. In their abstracts and presentations, symposium presenters address archaeological questions across diverse sub-disciplines, geographical regions, and temporal ranges. These symposium presentations are explicit about 1) why the novel technique required development or adoption and 2) the impact of these new methods on their respective field. All participants of the Society for American Archaeology meeting are encouraged to attend this symposium, as it will give them the chance to become aware of analytical advancements potentially applicable to their individual specializations.
Other Keywords
Quantitative and Spatial Analysis •
Digital Archaeology: Simulation and Modeling •
Paleoindian and Paleoamerican •
Lithic Analysis •
network analysis •
Ancestral Pueblo •
Iron Age •
Environment and Climate •
Dating Techniques: Radiometric •
demography
Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) •
United States of America (Country) •
USA (Country) •
Multi-regional/comparative •
Kansas (State / Territory) •
New Mexico (State / Territory) •
Oklahoma (State / Territory) •
Arizona (State / Territory) •
Texas (State / Territory) •
Sonora (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-15 of 15)
- Documents (15)
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A 3D Geometric Morphometric Comparison of Bone Surface Modifications on Proboscidean Assemblages from the Western Great Lakes (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Currently, an alarming number of plants and animals are on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss caused by human activities and climate change. Though numerically unprecedented, this may not be the first instance of a human-driven mass extinction. For decades, scholars have hypothesized that human predation led to the...
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Analyzing Similarity of Animal Style Art in Iron Age North Central Eurasia: A New Way to Study Continental Expression of Religious Symbolism (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal Style Art (ASA), an iconographic style expressed on monuments and material culture, is a geographically widespread phenomenon in north central Eurasia during the Iron Age (ca. 1,000 BCE – 100 CE). ASA analyses usually focus on stylistic difference or similarity. This poster reports an artifact-focused macro-scale...
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Climate Change and the Foraging-Farming Transition on the Great Plains (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The foraging lifestyle persisted as the major human subsistence strategy worldwide for most of the human career. With notable exceptions, this way of life was eventually replaced by a subsistence base complemented and often dominated by cultivated foods. Archaeologists have proposed several hypotheses to explain this...
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The Effect of Climate Change on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most researchers agree that the extinction events of North American megafauna, including proboscideans, occurred approximately 13,000 years ago. The reason for the demise of these creatures, in particular proboscideans such as mammoth and mastodon, is a matter of debate. There are three accepted general hypotheses explaining...
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The Effects of Climate Change and Risk on the Foraging-Farming Transition in North America (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The evolution of the Homo lineage is characterized by the emergence of numerous biological and cultural traits. One behavioral trait is the transition from foraging to farming. Some scholars suggest that climate change contributed to the emergence of agriculture while others hypothesize that continually increasing foraging risk...
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Evaluating Chronological Hypotheses by Simulating Radiocarbon Datasets (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Evaluating chronological hypotheses using complex radiocarbon datasets is challenging. Sources of variability, including measurement error, interlab variability, uncertainty associated with the radiocarbon calibration curve, the inherent randomness of the physical processes of radiocarbon formation and decay, and potential...
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Generalized Additive Mixed Models for Archaeological Networks (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Distance is a fundamental constraint on human social interaction. This basic principle motivates the use of spatial interaction models for estimating flows of people, information, and resources on spatial and social networks. These models have both valid dynamical and statistical interpretations, a key strength well supported...
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Inferences about and Inferences from: A Comparison of Kernel Density Estimation and Latent Mixture Modeling in Demographic Temporal Frequency Analysis (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Temporal frequency analysis (TFA) comprises methods both for the characterization of temporal distributions of archaeological samples and for drawing inferences about their underlying data generating processes (DGPs). In motivation, these two activities resemble descriptive and inferential statistics, respectively. However,...
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Investigating Craft Specialization and Pottery Standardization Using Geometric Morphometry of Vessel Shapes from Iron Age Northeast Taiwan (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Changes in craft production over time can indicate shifts in past social structures. However, traditional typological and linear measurements of vessels are limited because they can be insensitive to subtle variations resulting from changes in craft specialization. To overcome this limitation, we measured craft specialization...
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Modeling Regional-Scale Vulnerabilities to Drought through Least Cost Analyses: An Archaeological Case Study from the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico (2019)
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This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present a new approach for identifying archaeological proxies for community vulnerabilities to climate change: least cost analyses of water acquisition costs from archaeological sites to water. By automating the least cost analysis through a custom Python script in ArcGIS Pro, we modeled the 1-way cost for water acquisition...
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Shaping Hominin Cognition: A Comparative Three-dimensional Shape Analysis of LCTs and Cores from the Early Acheulean at Kokiselei 4, West Turkana, Kenya (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of ‘shaping’ abilities in hominin lithic technology involved increases in higher-order cognition including forward planning, working memory, and spatial reasoning. Longstanding assumptions engrained in lithic typologies claimed that "Long Core Tools" (LCTs), such as "handaxes", were the earliest shaped lithics....
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Simulation and the Identification of Archaeologically-Relevant Units of Analysis in the Study of Prehistoric Cultural Transmission (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Reconciling the archaeological record’s coarse grain with the person-to-person information exchanges central to cultural transmission (CT) models will allow us to better tap this powerful body of theory. Previous efforts at reconciliation demonstrated that within- and between-assemblage coefficients of variation (CV) are...
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Using Event History Methods to Analyze the Diffusion of Dynastic Rituals in Classic Maya Society (2019)
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This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diffusion of innovation describes the way novel cultural traits or information spread in a population. Understanding the specific factors that account for the spread of these innovations calls for a multivariate approach. Event history analysis provides a set of statistical methods to explain and predict the occurrence of...
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Using Quantitative Methods to Assess Network Change in Coupled Human/Natural Systems (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our understanding of the dynamics and stability of human systems cannot be uncoupled from their environmental and ecological contexts. Archaeological knowledge can deeply inform, enhance and transform our understanding of socio-ecological dynamics and sustainability, if we can only quantitatively assess these interactions. One...
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ZooaRchGUI: Novel Implementations to the Statistical Package for Archaeologists in the R Programming Language (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Novel Statistical Techniques in Archaeology I (QUANTARCH I)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of zooarchaeological data illuminates some of the most important and challenging questions in archaeology. Statistical and other quantitative methods are frequently employed to address these questions by evaluating hypotheses with empirical evidence. Such methodologies range from standard "statistical tests" to novel,...