Bayesian Archaeology
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Bayesian Archaeology" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Archaeologists and other scientists typically use statistical techniques to evaluate how well empirical evidence supports their hypotheses. Historically, null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has been a frequently used framework to achieve this goal. Today's NHST methods underlie popular statistical concepts such as confidence intervals and probability statements (p-values). NHST employs those statistical concepts to make probabilistic statements about one's data in relation to a hypothesis. Although this approach is very useful, the fundamental concepts in NHST can often seem arbitrary and confusing. Archaeologists and other scientists have begun to incorporate Bayesian methods into their analyses. Leveraging the weight of prior and new evidence, Bayesian inference empowers scientists to assign probabilities to competing hypotheses for comparison and enables their revision in light of new information (NHST does not). The Bayesian approach offers an alternative and, in some respects, improved statistical framework over NHST that is now practically approachable thanks to modern computing methods. This symposium aims to highlight the creative and diverse employment of Bayesian inference by archaeologists and illuminate its structure, procedures, and accessibility, featuring the benefits of its implementation and replicability to archaeological research.
Other Keywords
Chronology •
Dating Techniques •
Survey •
Theory •
Statistics •
Landscape Archaeology •
Archaic •
Woodland •
Paleolithic •
Neolithic
Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
State of Eritrea (Country) •
Republic of Yemen (Country) •
Asia (Continent) •
North America •
United Mexican States (Country) •
Delaware (State / Territory) •
Georgia (State / Territory) •
Mississippi (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
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Bayesian Exponential Random Graph Modeling of an Iron Age Burial Network in Northeastern Taiwan (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burials provide valuable information to study social structures and discuss social inequality. The relationship between prestige goods among burials may reflect the social relations between individuals, since prestige goods usually relate to social practices of trade, exchange, and gifting. We ask whether European colonial activities in seventeenth-century Taiwan...
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A Critical Reevaluation of Radiocarbon Ages from the Berdoll Site (41TV2125), in Support of Refined Site Spatial and Contextual Analyses (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Berdoll site is a deeply buried early Archaic campsite in the floodplain of Onion Creek in Travis County, Texas. It presents direct evidence of plant food processing at approximately 7606–8291 BP (conventional). Seventeen charred botanical remains including onion bulbs from earth ovens were submitted to two different radiocarbon labs for analysis. Considered...
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The Effect of Climate Change and Human Predation on the Niche Space of North American Proboscideans (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Approximately 13,000 years ago, 37 genera of North American megafauna went extinct. Proboscideans, mammoths, and mastodons, specifically, were among the megafauna affected. Today, researchers continue to debate between three hypotheses to explain these North American Pleistocene mass extinctions: (1) human over-hunting, (2) climate change leading to a reduced niche,...
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Iterative Temporal Hygiene and Bayesian Analyses of Radiocarbon Datasets: The Impact of Kernel Density Estimation on Clarifying Temporal Relationships among Woodland Period Phases, Middle Scioto Valley, Ohio (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The accumulation of radiocarbon dates for Scioto Valley Woodland period sites has created a palimpsest, which inhibits chronological understanding of cultural change. The project iteratively integrates temporal hygiene and Bayesian analyses of large radiocarbon datasets from multiple sites, in an attempt to clean up problematic features of such datasets and provide...
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Morphometric Comparison of Early Hominin Butchery Evidence to Carnivore Modifications within a Bayesian Framework (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of stone tool use for butchery by early hominins is a contested topic due to the rarity of early tool evidence. In the absence of tools, the primary trace evidence for their use as butchery implements is bone surface modifications (BSM). However, current BSM recognition protocols are subjective. They can lead to conflicting identifications—for example,...
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The Use of Bayesian Allocation for the Optimization of Archaeological Survey Effort (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Today, many archaeological surveys have the goal of documenting, as completely as possible, the locations and character of sites, many of which are rare, unobtrusive, or both. Increasingly over the last three decades, archaeologists have used predictive models in a GIS to help them target spaces that are most likely to contain sites of interest, or sites under...
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Why a Bayesian Archaeology? A Pain-Free Introduction (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bayesian inference and its underlying philosophy offer an alternative to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST), the conventional statistical framework in archaeology. Due to new technological advances, Bayesian inference has become an essential component of broader scientific efforts and progressively prevalent in archaeological research. Here, without using...
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Why Not a Bayesian Archaeology? Debunking Misconceptions about Bayesian Statistics (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bayesian inference has become a popular framework for statistical analyses across scientific fields in the past several decades, thanks to the development of software for generalized or specialized Bayesian modeling. With the logistical barriers to Bayesian inference becoming less onerous, a wide variety of Bayesian applications have started to appear in scientific...