The course will introduce students to the theoretical ideas and the practical uses of databases and statistical analysis. The first part of the course deals with archaeological data and databases. A series of theoretical questions are addressed such as the relationship between archaeological data and the archaeological record and the subjective input, simplifications and standardizations inherent in archaeological data. Afterwards, the students will be introduced to the database software Microsoft Access. Through examples and practical exercises, the students will learn to construct and manipulate a database and to do basic data analysis. The second part of the course focuses on statistical analysis. An important first step will be to deconstruct the myth of objectivity that is associated with statistics, emphasizing the need to critically approach statistical results. Therefore, like any other archaeological method, all statistical procedures need to be grounded in archaeological theory. The students will then be taught the basic functioning of the SPSS statistical software. Using examples and practical tasks, the students will learn how to import data, perform basic statistical procedures, visualize and export the results. At the end of the course, some advanced statistical modeling procedures will be briefly presented, together with the R software environment. Evaluation Procedure: Evaluation ist done by practical tasks during the classes and as "home exercise". Schließen

Baxter, Michael. 2003. Statistics in Archaeology. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Chapter 2. Circulating Reference. In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, p. 24-79. Shennan, Stephen. 1997. Quantifying Archaeology. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. VanPool, Todd L, and Robert D Leonard. 2011. Quantitative Analysis in Archaeology. Chichester : Wiley-Blackwell. Schließen