Understanding the Relationship Between Sample Size and Variation in Ceramic Relative Chronologies at the Petrified Forest National Park

Summary

Petrified Forest National Park contains an extensive prehistoric ceramic variability, exhibiting ceramics from multiple regions at later prehistoric sites. Like much of the Southwest, most of the research at the park is survey oriented, recording only a sample of ceramics on site. The high diversity of ceramics and small sample sizes has the potential to create a recording bias when using ceramics to relatively date sites. This project investigates the relationship between site diversity and sample. To analyze this a large ceramic sample will be recorded from three well dated Pueblo III sites within the park. From these three larger samples smaller random data subsets will be dated to see the range of ceramic relative dating within each sample size. This understanding will help the park to better relatively date newly recorded sites and thus shed light on the larger issue of how relative chronologies are impacted by sample size.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Recent Archaeological Research in Petrified Forest National Park

Keywords

Spatial Coverage