Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Simple Statistics And Archaeological Problems, James R. Allison

Faculty Publications

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 …