Nelson: Prehistoric Ceramics at Pueblo San Cristobal, New Mexico, USA
In archdata: Example Datasets from Archaeological Research

Description Usage Format Details Source References Examples

Ceramic distribution in a midden deposit at Pueblo San Cristobal reported by Nels Nelson in 1916.

1	data(Nelson)

A data frame with 10 observations on the following 8 variables.

Depth: Depth in feet from 1 to 10 for 1 foot arbitrary excavation levels
Corrugated: Number of corrugated ware ceramics
Biscuit: Number of Biscuit ware ceramics
Type_I: Number of two and three color painted ware ceramics
Type_II_Red: Number of two color glazed red ware ceramics
Type_II_Yellow: Number of two color glazed yellow ware ceramics
Type_II_Gray: Number of two color glazed gray ware ceramics
Type_III: Number of three color glazed ware ceramics

Data from a midden deposit at San Cristobal in the American Southwest. It has been used as a classic illustration of the potential for creating a relative chronology using frequency seriation of ceramic artifact types. The site was occupied approximately from CE 1350 to 1680. Ceramic artifact fragment counts are presented for each 1-foot (30 cm) arbitrary level excavated in the midden deposit. When converted to percentages (usually excluding the corrugated ware), the data illustrate a classical "battleship curve" like those described in Ford (1962).

Nelson, N. C. 1916. Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico. American Anthropologist 18(2): 159–180.

Carlson, David L. 2017. Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Using R. Cambridge University Press, pp 381-386, 390-393.

Ford, J. A. (1962) A Quantitative Method for Deriving Cultural Chronology. Pan American Union, Technical Manual No 1.

data(Nelson)
# Remove Depth and Corrugated and compute percentages
Nelson.pct <- prop.table(as.matrix(Nelson[,3:7]), 1)*100
# Percentages for each type by level
round(Nelson.pct, 2)

# Battleship plot from plotrix package
if (requireNamespace("plotrix", quietly = TRUE)) {
  plotrix::battleship.plot(Nelson.pct, col="gray")
} else {
  cat("This example requires package plotrix.\n")
}