Paper #1433

Title:

"Mathematics and Archaeology" rediscovered

Author:

Michael Greenacre

Date:

July 2014

Abstract:

The book "Mathematics and Archaeology", consisting of 25 chapters by a range of international scholars in archaeology, will be published by Chapman & Hall in 2014. The present document, written as an invited Epilogue to the book, recounts the rediscovery of the book 275 years later by an archaeolinguist. The remnants of the book have been found in the Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s dilapidated library, which fell into disuse after books were abandoned in favour of electronic publishing. The archaeolinguist explains how statistical methods found in old texts on quantitative archaeology helped to piece together the basic content of this book, using the words in the chapters as artefacts.

Keywords:

archaeology, clustering, correspondence analysis, linguistics, multivariate analysis, textual data mining.

JEL codes:

C19;C88

Area of Research:

Statistics, Econometrics and Quantitative Methods

Published in:

: Mathematics and Archaeology, (eds) Barcelo, J.A.and Bogdanovic, I., Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, USA, 491–499

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