The Awful Truth about Statistics in Archaeology
- 1 April 1978
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in American Antiquity
- Vol. 43 (2) , 231-244
- https://doi.org/10.2307/279247
Abstract
The archaeology of the past two decades has become increasingly quantitative, computerized, statistical, and this is as it should be. All right-thinking archaeologists begin with samples and attempt to generalize about the populations from which their samples were drawn. Statistical theory has evolved to assist investigators in making just this important inferential step and archaeologists have increasingly turned to statistics to square their research with the canons of Science. But the statistical revolution in archaeology is not without its price. We must now face the fact that all applications of statistics to archaeology can no longer be applauded. The archaeological literature is badly polluted with misuses and outright abuses of statistical method and theory. This paper discusses some of these faulty applications and makes some recommendations which, if heeded, should improve the quality of quantitative methods in archaeology.Keywords
This publication has 19 references indexed in Scilit:
- Dating Stem Fragments of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Clay Tobacco Pipes*Published by Taylor & Francis ,2019
- Numerical Taxonomy, R-Mode Factor Analysis, and Archaeological ClassificationAmerican Antiquity, 1977
- An Envirotechnological System for Hogup CaveAmerican Antiquity, 1975
- Working with the “new paradigm”Reviews in Anthropology, 1974
- Scientific ArchaeologyNature, 1973
- Problems in “Avant‐Garde” Archaeology1American Anthropologist, 1972
- On the Use of Cumulative Curves and Numerical TaxonomyAmerican Antiquity, 1971
- Archaeological Applications of Factor, Cluster, and Proximity AnalysisAmerican Antiquity, 1968
- Some experiments in the numerical analysis of archaeological dataBiometrika, 1966
- An Experiment in the Numerical Classification of Some Kansas SoilsSoil Science Society of America Journal, 1964