Chapter 13

With this opening sentence, Albert Spaulding introduced a now commonly used statistical procedure to archaeology called chi-square analysis. Spaulding was dissatisfied by typological procedures in common use at the time, and sought to make typology rigorous, replicable, and scientific. Most archaeologists at the time created archaeological types by putting artifacts together on a table, and then putting similar objects together in a pile. What constituted “similar” was up to the individual building the piles. Of course, what one individual determined to be similar differed from what another might see. This led to no end of problems—one of the most significant being that a select group of individuals who originally created types in a region became the “expert” on the type they created. As a consequence, if a student didn’t learn types at the feet of the Master (or one of the Master’s apprentices), their work was forever suspect.