Dr. Contreras
This course introduces students to the basic quantitative methods required to describe and analyze archaeological data. Each week will introduce a new data analysis or data visualization technique, and ask students to use that technique in order to address a small research problem. Because many of the challenges archaeologists face have to do with acquiring, managing, and analyzing data, as well as constructing and communicating empirically-founded arguments, this course will emphasize not only statistical methods, but also 1) how to construct and critically evaluate arguments grounded in quantitative data, and 2) how to explore, analyze, and display data in the open-source R statistical environment.