From the artefacts to material culture, Statistical modelling using R
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 15/10/2020

By using small finds as cultural markers, this analysis aims to highlight recurrent typological assemblages  in  eastern  Gaul  between  the  3rd  century  BC  and  the  4th  century  AD.  The  idea  behind this study is, therefore, to combine the information intrinsic to objects (typology, chro-nology, localisation) to quantitative data based on artefacts inventories and online databases. This method relies on a classical approach in archaeology, which is to determine cultural groups based on artefacts and their geographical distribution. However, this study adopts a new prism by  modelling  the  data  and  developing  statistical  analysis  tools  to  process  large  quantities  of  variables  (over  15000  objects  for  now).  This  allows  us  to  establish  types  distribution  graphs,  a sort of typological « barcode », for each site or area. These are then compared to each other, using clustering techniques and distance diagrams. This method therefore takes into account all artefacts considered as cultural markers, with no limitation regarding discovery contexts. The cultural groups thus defined are differentiated by characteristic typological assemblages. The presence or absence of a certain type is no longer a determining factor. Moreover, it is eas-ily possible with this method to add or remove a type of object in order to see if it affects the making of those cultural groups. This modelling is created on the open-source software R for its ability to treat efficiently an extensive dataset as well as its flexible framework.


Lizzie Scholtus