The goal of evoarchdata is to make easily available some important artefact datasets from archaeological studies of cultural evolution. The motivation for this package is to make it easier to teach and study cultural evolution in the archaeological record.
You can install the development version of evoarchdata from GitHub with:
if (!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools")
install_github("benmarwick/evoarchdata")
Here’s a summary of the datasets currently in this package:
tbl_of_data <- vcdExtra::datasets("evoarchdata")
#> Loading package: evoarchdata
knitr::kable(tbl_of_data)
| Item | class | dim | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| armature_types_france | data.frame | 9x20 | Arrowheads from Neolithic France (Crema et al. 2014; Saintot 1998) |
| ceramics_hittite_turkey | data.frame | 18x7 | Ceramic bowls from Boğazköy-Hattusa (Steele et al. 2010; Brantingham and Perreault 2010) |
| ceramics_lbk_merzbach | data.frame | 8x37 | Decorative motifs in the Merzbach assemblage, Neolithic Germany (Crema et al. 2016) |
| ceramics_woodland_illinois | data.frame | 160x15 | Illinois Woodland Ceramics (Braun 1977, 1985; Neiman 1995) |
| kurgans_catacomb | data.frame | 703x56 | Kurgans of the Catacomb culture (Ślusarska 2006) |
| lithics_acheulean_virtual | data.frame | 200x4 | Copying error in virtual Acheulean handaxes (Kempe et al. 2012) |
| lithics_lpalaeolithic_neurope | data.frame | 632x6 | Late Palaeolithic Projectile Points from Northern Europe (Riede 2009) |
| textiles_ikat_seasia | data.frame | 36x111 | Southeast Asian Warp Ikat Weaving (Buckley 2012) |
To use a dataset in your R session, you can load it like this:
library(evoarchdata)
data(ceramics_lbk_merzbach)
# and then take a look at the data
ceramics_lbk_merzbach
#> Phase BT14 BT25 BT60 BT21 BT36 BT44 BT20 BT22 BT19 BT27 BT29 BT24 BT26 BT6
#> 1 VII 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2 0 1 9 0 0
#> 2 VIII 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 0 1 8 0 0
#> 3 IX 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 7 0 0 10 4 1
#> 4 X 0 0 0 2 0 0 7 11 13 4 1 19 8 2
#> 5 XI 7 1 0 4 2 1 39 3 49 12 0 46 7 5
#> 6 XII 19 5 0 8 3 2 71 12 134 14 1 82 28 1
#> 7 XIII 17 4 1 3 1 1 74 9 139 15 2 92 19 0
#> 8 XIV 41 9 1 9 3 3 48 4 84 11 3 45 8 1
#> BT3 BT17 BT13 BT16 BT5 BT2 BT11 BT99 BT49 BT12 BT4 BT15 BT9 BT39 BT10 BT8 BT1
#> 1 7 0 28 2 10 73 16 0 0 14 15 5 23 1 108 337 510
#> 2 8 0 35 1 13 59 8 0 0 16 7 2 8 0 43 120 157
#> 3 21 0 79 3 9 47 20 0 0 18 7 6 2 0 34 72 68
#> 4 41 1 99 5 14 60 23 0 0 12 1 3 4 1 35 43 59
#> 5 104 3 204 8 37 128 32 0 0 14 3 2 11 0 25 49 66
#> 6 156 3 284 12 36 135 22 0 0 11 3 0 5 0 3 23 45
#> 7 137 1 205 7 19 54 6 0 0 2 4 0 1 0 2 8 14
#> 8 67 0 60 2 8 11 1 0 0 2 3 1 0 0 1 3 3
#> BT30 BT18 BT47 BT38 BT23
#> 1 3 6 3 4 5
#> 2 0 2 0 0 0
#> 3 0 1 0 0 0
#> 4 1 0 0 0 0
#> 5 0 0 0 0 0
#> 6 0 0 0 0 0
#> 7 0 0 0 0 0
#> 8 0 0 0 0 0
If you use any of these datasets, you must cite the original publication, listed below.
The datasets are made available here for fair use in teaching and
research. All datasets are copyright of the original author or
publisher, except ceramics_lbk_merzbach which is distributed by Crema
et al (2016) under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY
license, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original work is properly cited.
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.
Brantingham, P Jeffrey, and Charles Perreault. 2010. “Detecting the Effects of Selection and Stochastic Forces in Archaeological Assemblages.” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (12): 3211–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2010.07.021.
Braun, David P. 1977. “Middle Woodland—(Early) Late Woodland Social Change in the Prehistoric Central Midwestern US.” PhD thesis, University of Michigan.
———. 1985. “Ceramic Decorative Diversity and Illinois Woodland Regional Integration.” In Decoding Prehistoric Ceramics, edited by Ben A Nelson, 128–53. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Buckley, Christopher D. 2012. “Investigating Cultural Evolution Using Phylogenetic Analysis: The Origins and Descent of the Southeast Asian Tradition of Warp Ikat Weaving.” PLoS ONE 7 (12): e52064. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0052064.
Crema, Enrico R, Anne Kandler, and Stephen Shennan. 2016. “Revealing Patterns of Cultural Transmission from Frequency Data: Equilibrium and Non-Equilibrium Assumptions.” Scientific Reports 6 (December): 39122. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39122.
Crema, E R, K Edinborough, T Kerig, and S J Shennan. 2014. “An Approximate Bayesian Computation Approach for Inferring Patterns of Cultural Evolutionary Change.” Journal of Archaeological Science 50 (October): 160–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.07.014.
Kempe, Marius, Stephen Lycett, and Alex Mesoudi. 2012. “An Experimental Test of the Accumulated Copying Error Model of Cultural Mutation for Acheulean Handaxe Size.” Edited by Carles Lalueza-Fox. PloS ONE 7 (11): e48333. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048333.
Neiman, Fraser D. 1995. “Stylistic Variation in Evolutionary Perspective: Inferences from Decorative Diversity and Interassemblage Distance in Illinois Woodland Ceramic Assemblages.” American Antiquity 60 (1): 7–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/282074.
Riede, Felix. 2009. “The Loss and Re-Introduction of Bow-and-Arrow Technology: A Case Study from the Northern European Late Paleolithic.” Lithic Technology 34 (1): 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/01977261.2009.11721072.
Roe, Joe. 2013. “Cultural Phylogeny of Kurgan Burial Mounds in the West Eurasian Steppe.” Master’s thesis, University College London.
Saintot, Sylvie. 1998. “III. Les Armatures de Flèches En Silex de Chalain et de Clairvaux.” Gallia Préhistoire 40 (1): 204–41.
Ślusarska, Katarzyna. 2006. Funeral Rites of the Catacomb Community: 2800–1900 BC: Ritual, Thanatology and Geographical Origins. Adam Mickiewicz University. Institute of Eastern Studies. Institute of Prehistory.
Steele, James, Claudia Glatz, and Anne Kandler. 2010. “Ceramic Diversity, Random Copying, and Tests for Selectivity in Ceramic Production.” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (6): 1348–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2009.12.039.