Information

• Place: Departement of Archaeology and Museology, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech republic
• Language: Czech
• Semesters: spring 2014, spring 2016, spring 2018
• Open to: all (Bc, Mgr, PhD)

Objectives

The objective of the course is to present basic statistical nomenclature and methodology used in modern archaeological inquires. The cours will cover mainly the use of graphics and hypotheses testing.

At the end of this course, the student will be able to:

• understand the basic statistical terms
• calculate and interpret the values of the central tendency
• create the basic graphs and interpret them
• interpret distributions of variables
• calculate and interpret the amount of correlation between variables
• calculate the linear regression model and – on its basis – to predict values
• define the null and the alternative hypothesis
• understand the probability distribution, the meaning of statistical significance and the basics of the inferential statistics
• use the basic parametrical tests (t-test for independent and dependent samples, t-test for correlation coefficients, and the analysis of variance)
• understand the basic data treatment in MS Excel, PAST and StatSoft Statistika

Planning

• 1. The basic statistical terms.
• 2. Types of variables.
• 3. Descriptive and inferential statistics.
• 4. Descriptive statistics (frequency tables, graphs, characteristics of the central tendency, characteristics of the variability, distribution).
• 5. Correlation.
• 6. Linear regression.
• 7. The probability distribution.
• 8. Hypotheses and their testing.
• 9. One-dimensional statistical parametric tests (t-test for independent and dependent samples, t-test for correlation coefficients, ANOVA).

Materials

• PAST (http://folk.uio.no/ohammer/past/)
• R project (https://www.r-project.org/)
• R Studio (https://www.rstudio.com/)
• Compendium
• Tables
• Excercises_01
• Excercises_02
• Excercises_03
• Excercises_04
• Dataset
• Which statistical test to choose (in PAST) (added 2018/03/27)

Literature – Basics

• Bertrand, F., Maumy-Bertrand, M. 2011: Statistique pour les scientifiques. Dunod, 220 p.
• Calda, E., Dupáč, V. 1993: Matematika pro gymnázia. Kombinatorika, pravděpodobnost, statistika. Prometheus, 170 p.
• Hebák, P. a kol. 2013: Statistické myšlení a nástroje analýzy dat. Informatorium, Praha, 877 p.
• Hendl, J. 2009: Přehled statistických metod. Analýza a metaanalýza dat. Portál, Praha, 695 p.
• Marek, L. a kol. 2013: Statistika v příkladech. Professional Publishing, Příbram, 404 p.
• Meloun, M., Militký, J. 2004: Statistická analýza experimentálních dat. Academia, Praha, 953 p.
• Meloun, M., Militký, J., Hill, M. 2005: Počítačová analýza vícerozměrných dat v příkladech. Academia, Praha, 450 p.

Literature – Statistics in archaeology

• Baxter, M. 1994: Exploratory Multivariate Analysis in Archaeology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
• Baxter, M. 2003: Statistics in Archaeology. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Drennan, R.D. 2009: Statistics for Archaeologists. A Common Sense Approach. Springer.
• Fletcher, M., Lock, G. R. 2005: Digging Numbers: Elementary Statistics for Archaeologists. Oxford University Comittee for Archaeology, Oxford.
• Orton, C. 1982: Mathematics in Archaology. Cambridge University Press., Cambridge.
• Orton, C. 2000: Sampling in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press.
• Shennan, S. 1997: Quantifying Archaeology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.