Simple Statistics and Archaeological Problems

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Among Keith Kintigh’s many contributions to archaeology was his emphasis on understanding the connections among quantitative methods, archaeological problems, and what archaeologists can reasonably infer from their data. In both publications and in the classroom, he demonstrated the value of simple computer simulations to understand quantitative measures and how they behave when applied to actual archaeological data. Archaeological research increasingly incorporates analysis of large databases and quantitative methods appropriate to "big data", but simple statistics are still important to archaeological research. This paper uses computer-intensive methods to demonstrate that archaeologists (and others) frequently misunderstand and misapply some of the simplest statistics used in archaeology: chi-square tests and related methods for examining cross-tabulated data (e.g., artifact counts by provenience). These tests rely on assumptions about sampling that are usually not appropriate for archaeology, and, when applied to archaeological data in textbook fashion, they often give wildly misleading results. Computer simulations provide a better understanding of the issues involved, and of how to use these (not so) simple statistics to provide valid insights about archaeological questions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23345