MaskSite: Mask Site, Alaska, USA

In archdata: Example Datasets from Archaeological Research

Description

The distribution of five categories of artifacts at the Mask site, occupied by the Nunamiut (Binford 1978a).

Usage

data("MaskSite")

Format

A data frame with 494 observations on the following 3 variables.

X

horizontal coordinate

Y

vertical coordinate

Category

a factor with levels Artifacts, Spent Cartridges, Wood Shavings, Bone Splinters, and Large Bones

Details

The Mask Site was reported by Binford (1978a) as an example of a hunting stand where Nunamiut men watched for game as part of a larger ethnoarchaeological study of the Nunamiut (Binford 1978b). The data from the site have been widely used to illustrate the utility of various methods of intra site spatial analysis (including Baxter 2003, Blankholm 1991, Kintigh 1990, and Whallon 1984). The data consist of 494 locations of five different classes (artifacts, spent cartridges, wood shavings, bone splinters, and large bones). The data were scanned from Appendix A (Blankholm 1991).

Source

Binford, L. R. 1978a. Dimensional Analysis of Behavior and Site Structure: Learning from an Eskimo Hunting Stand. American Antiquity 43: 330 - 361.

Blankholm, Hans Peter. 1991. Intrasite Spatial Analysis in Theory and Practice. Aarhus University Press.

References

Baxter, M. 2003. Statistics in Archaeology. Arnold Applications in Statistics.

Binford, L. R. 1978b. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. Academic Press.

Kintigh, K. 1990. Intrasite Spatial Analysis: A Commentary on Major Methods. In Mathematics and Information Science in Archaeology: A Flexible Framework, edited by A. Voorrips, pp 165-200. Studies in Modern Archaeology 3. Holos.

Whallon, R. 1984. Unconstrained Clustering for the Analysis of Spatial Distributions in Archaeology. In Intrasite Spatial Analysis in Archaeology, edited by H. Hietala, pp 242 - 277. Cambridge University Press.

Examples

data(MaskSite)
plot(Y~X, MaskSite, main="Mask Site", asp=1, pch=as.numeric(Category), cex=.75)
legend("bottomright", levels(MaskSite$Category), pch=1:5)

Example output

archdata documentation built on Jan. 16, 2021, 5:35 p.m.