The R package arkhaia contains functions related to
research on economic relationships via archaeological or otherwise
historical data. The main focus is on evaluation of changes in long-term
“integrating” or “integrated” relationships over time between
communities, primarily through the material evidence of artifact
assemblages. The problem of how to detect similar patterns over time in
a given behavior is a broad one that requires specificity in order to
address mathematically, and so this package provides the tools necessary
for handling counts of artifacts, as well as measurement data (such as
prices).
The package relies on Rcpp and
RcppArmadillo (Eddelbuettel and Sanderson 2014;
Eddelbuettel and Balamuta 2018).
To obtain the development version of the package,
devtools can be used to install arkhaia from
GitHub:
library(devtools)
install_github("scollinselliott/arkhaia", dependencies = TRUE, build_vignettes = TRUE) Establishing a measure of practical signficance for the comparison of finds assemblages in their depositional contexts. Whether or not a context is “representative” of another is assessed on the basis of the homogeneity of the distribution of finds. The relevant paper has been reviewed and is under revision: Collins-Elliott (Under Review), “Evaluating…”
Random right-censoring of archaeological count data. Assemblages of artifacts that do not belong to primary contexts (i.e., “random” secondary or tertiary contexts), comprise a minimum amount of finds that were “is use” in a given locality. From a contingency table of those minimum counts, it is possible to generate distributions of counts in use from which to evaluate This paper is currently under review: Collins-Elliott (Under Review), “Random…”
Least squares spectral analysis (LSSA), with an implementation of fitting by lowest frequency iteratively (LSSA-LFI), to fit sparse time-indexed observations and then evaluate whether there exists linear dependence in their data-generating process via model comparison. The paper applying this method to Babylonian price data is under review: Collins-Elliott (Under Review), “Revisiting…”