archdata (version 1.0)

Nelson: Prehistoric Ceramics at Pueblo San Cristobal, New Mexico, USA

Description

Ceramic distribution in a midden deposit at Pueblo San Cristobal reported by Nels Nelson in 1916.

Usage

data(Nelson)

source

Nelson, N. C. 1916. Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico. American Anthropologist 18(2): 159--180.

Details

Data from a classic illustration of the potential for creating a relative chronology using frequency seriation of ceramic artifact types from a midden deposit at San Cristobal in the American Southwest. The site was occupied approximately from CE 1350 to 1680. Ceramic artifact fragment counts are presented for each 1-foot arbitrary level excavated within the midden deposit. When converted to percentages (usually excluding the corrugated ware), the data illustrate a classical "battleship curve" like those described in Ford (1962).

References

Ford, J. A. (1962) A Quantitative Method for Deriving Cultural Chronology. Pan American Union, Technical Manual No 1.

Examples

data(Nelson)
# Remove Depth and Corrugated and compute percentages
Nelson.pct <- prop.table(as.matrix(Nelson[,3:7]), 1)*100
# Percentages for each type by level
round(Nelson.pct, 2)
# Battleship plot from plotrix package
library(plotrix)
battleship.plot(Nelson.pct)