Over the course of 2016, I worked with three students in the Anthropology Department here at UK. From top to bottom are Victoria Dekle, Vanessa Hanvey, and Tyler Stumpf. Our objectives were to learn how to apply ordination and clustering techniques to archaeological observations and to conduct analyses of pilot data as well as formal dissertation data sets. Victoria's PhD dissertation assesses the extent the mouth of the Savannah River in Georgia forms a boundary in the characteristics of pottery shards. For Vanessa's project we looked at how shards excavated across a small watershed in the coastal plain of southeastern Georgia differed according to position relative to the river network. Tyler's work examines how the characteristics of building structures from across the southeastern and south-central U.S. differ based on whether they date to the period before European colonization or after the extensive establishment of Spanish missions. As committee member and through independent studies, we explored how to organize their datasets and delineate groups for comparing observations. The techniques we made use of were non-metric multidimensional scaling, principle coordinates analysis, flexible beta clustering, and classification trees using DTREG software.
