Search results for ""author william g. cavanagh""

Statistics in Practice A new series of practical books outliningthe use of statistical techniques in a wide range of applicationareas: Human and Biological Sciences Earth and Environmental Sciences Industry, Commerce and Finance The authors of this important text explore the processes throughwhich archaeologists analyse their data and how these can be mademore rigorous and effective by sound statistical modelling. Theyassume relatively little previous statistical or mathematicalknowledge. Introducing the idea underlying the Bayesian approach tothe statistical analysis of data and their subsequentinterpretation, the authors demonstrate the major advantage of thisapproach, i.e. that it allows the incorporation of relevant priorknowledge or beliefs into the analysis. By doing so it provides alogical and coherent way of updating beliefs from those held beforeobserving the data to those held after taking the data intoaccount. To illustrate the power and effectiveness of mathematicaland statistical modelling within the Bayesian framework, a varietyof real case studies are presented covering areas of commoninterest to archaeologists. These case studies cover applicationsin areas such as radiocarbon dating, spatial analysis, provenancestudies and other dating methods. Background to these case studiesis provided for those readers not so familiar with the subject.Thus, the book provides an examination of the theoretical andpractical consequences of Bayesian analysis for examining problemsin archaeology. Students of archaeology and related disciplines andprofessional archaeologists will find the book an informative andpractical introduction to the subject.

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The Wider Island of Pelops explores the myriad ways in which pottery was created, utilized, and experienced in the prehistoric Aegean, across a period of more than 4000 years between the Middle Neolithic and the Early Iron Age transition. Pottery is capable both of creating bonds and creating barriers. It serves as a sociocultural call and response, marking similarity and difference, collectivism and individualism, knowledge, and the absence of knowledge. Contextually-bound, it embodies identities, memories and multiple histories. It reflects choice and reinforces orthodoxy; a product of change, and a driver of it, that both creates and curates understanding of the world. Necessity and commodity, at times anachronistic, and at others, avant-garde, it is subversive and slavish, innovative and derivative; visible always, and never without value. The seventeen papers collected here provide a diachronic perspective on the value of pottery in marking and mediating cross-scale sociocultural discourse; in framing and facilitating the transmission of knowledge and meaning; in driving economies; in the preservation of memory, in the practice of cult; and, in more recent times, as a vector in the dialogue of imperialism: at once introducing key themes in the study of Aegean pottery, and providing a snapshot of recent archaeological work in Greece.

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