Notes on Quantitative Archaeology and R (original) (raw)

This is a book-length treatment on the subject of statistical methods frequently used in Quantitative Archaeology and their implementation using the open-source software R. It is not intended as a textbook or as an introduction to either statistical methods or R, though it is intended to be accessible. There are plenty of good texts on these subjects to which this text might be seen as complementary. There is an emphasis on the analysis of real data sets, more so than in typical introductory quantitative archaeology texts. There is, similarly, an emphasis not to be found in other archaeological texts on the practicalities of implementation using modern statistical software, R. This is an open-source and extremely powerful package that has grown rapidly into something of an ‘industry-standard’ in applied statistics, and other application areas, that has not really touched archaeology much yet, at least in terms of what is visible in the literature. The underlying premise, that statistical methods are conceptually simpler, and more easily implemented, than is often conceded is spelled out in the introductory chapter. For those unfamiliar with R, and with data they need to analyse, one way of putting this is that there is life beyond Excel and SPSS well worth making the effort to discover. The text is moderately lengthy and is also available in the form of individual chapters, along with the data sets used, in Excel format.