Professor Vin Steponaitis

• Office: Alumni Building, Room 108
• Hours: Tuesday 3:00-5:00 p.m., and by appointment (set up by email or call 962-6574)
• Email: vin@unc.edu

Course Description:  This course will survey a variety of quantitative methods that are of particular use to archaeologists. The emphasis will be on graphical and exploratory techniques, as well as on selected multivariate methods.

Course Structure:  Lectures on various topics will be followed by take-home exercises that illustrate the concepts and methods involved.

Meeting Times:  The course meets on Wednesdays, 9:00-11:45 a.m., in AL-201A.

Course Requirements:  Besides attending class and doing the assigned readings, you are expected to spend considerable time on weekly take-home exercises. There will also be a final exam.

Honor Code:  Students are expected to adhere to UNC's Honor Code. All written work must be accompanied by a signed pledge attesting that the student has neither given nor received unauthorized aid in completing the assignment. (One can use the short form and simply write "Pledge" followed by a signature.) Please note that you are encouraged to work together on exercises, to ask questions, and to refer to the readings as you are doing the analysis for each exercise. You may generate graphs, tables, and other illustrations jointly and share them freely within your working groups. However, the write-up of each exercise must be your own work. If you have any questions about this policy, please feel free to ask.

Course Syllabus:  Click here for a PDF version of the course syllabus. Note that the paper syllabus does not contain all the information and links that appear in the course web site, described below.

Books and Software:  I have ordered two books that are available at Student Stores: William Cleveland’s The Elements of Graphing Data, and Stephen Shennan’s Quantifying Archaeology. Both are excellent references. All the necessary software is available free of charge on UNC servers. You can access STATA on the computers in the Odum Institute Stat Lab (located in the basement of Manning Hall), or on any computer by connecting to the Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) server. Click here for instructions on how to do the latter.

Course Web Site:  This web site contains not only all the information in the course syllabus, but also "downloadable" versions of all the exercises and associated datasets.

Course Outline

8/25-9/8    Introduction and basics
9/15-9/22    Univariate distributions and graphs
9/29    Association and correlation
10/6    Sampling
10/13    Diversity
10/20    Classification and cluster analysis
10/27    [SEAC meetings; no class]
11/3    Seriation
11/10    Principal components analysis
11/17    Correspondence analysis
   [Thanksgiving holiday]
12/1    Spatial analysis (tentative)
12/8    Review and catch-up
12/10    Final exam (8 am)

Exercises

Exercise 1.  Introduction to STATA [Handout (pdf)]
Exercise 2.  Basic Graphs [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 3.  Dot Charts and Time Series [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 4.  Scatter Plots and Correlation [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 5.  Measures of Association and Best-Fit Lines [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 6.  Sampling and Shovel Test Pits [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 7.  Assemblage Diversity [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 8.  Cluster Analysis [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 9.  Seriation [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 10.  Principal Components Analysis [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 11.  Correspondence Analysis [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]
Exercise 12.  Spatial Analysis [Handout (pdf)] [Files (zip)]

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Last modified 11-27-10.