Is Pseudoreplication a Problem for Experimental Studies of Bone Surface Modification?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1984, Stuart Hurlbert defined pseudoreplication as “the use of inferential statistics to test for treatment effects with data from experiments where either treatments are not replicated (though samples may be) or replicates are not statistically independent” (Pseudoreplication and the Design of Ecological Field Experiments, *Ecological Monographs* 54(2):187–211). This manuscript suggested flawed design corrupted a large proportion of ecological experiments, and prompted critical reevaluation of experimental design and analytical methodology in fields beyond ecology, including psychology and animal behavior. In this talk, I draw on examples from my own experimental butchery research to highlight instances of pseudoreplication, discuss appropriate analyses of repeated measurements, and explore different analytical frameworks including Bayesian and machine-learning methodologies that may avoid problems which plague inferential statistics. Specifically, I discuss experimental treatment effects, replication, and independence of observations in experimental butchery trials intended to describe size differences and ultimately discriminate cut marks produced by different Early Stone Age flake and core tools across different anatomical locations on the ungulate skeleton. I conclude with design suggestions focused on replication in bone surface modification experiments and a discussion of how these actualistic data are used to support inferences about archaeological phenomena.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Animal Resources in Experimental Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36952.0