Evolution for the People: Big Data, Big Software, and How Compliance Archaeology is the Missing Link of Evolutionary Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A growing concern in archaeology is the potential inaccessibility of various methodological and theoretical approaches in non-academic contexts. Open access and open source software (R, Quantum GIS, ImageJ) provide means for applying complex analyses within a budget, but due to cybersecurity concerns these may not be available for archaeologists working for state, federal, or tribal agencies. In an effort to address this issue, I provide several case examples of using standard office suite software to conduct analyses examining artifact metric variation and stylistic variation typically employed in the evolutionary archaeological literature. I argue that these technological issues are not insurmountable for being able to analyze large datasets and that compliance archaeologists can contribute the large datasets necessary to capture variation and properly examine the material record from an evolutionary perspective. In effect their experience and datasets provide a "missing link" for assessing cultural evolutionary hypotheses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23996