Journal
JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 38, Issue 9, Pages 2420-2423Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS LTD- ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.05.009
Keywords
Ternary diagram; Faunal analysis; Zooarchaeology; Age profiles; Age distributions; Sample size; Age-at-death; Age structure
Funding
- UC Davis
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The construction of mortality profiles to investigate age-at-death patterns is a typical component of most faunal analyses. While many methods exist for constructing and comparing mortality profiles, plotting the percentages of juvenile, prime, and old individuals on a triangular graph, or ternary diagram, remains a popular method for making comparisons. Typically, these comparisons are made visually, but because sample sizes are often small, any differences may be the product of sampling rather than meaningful contrasts in depositional history. To overcome this problem, here we present a likelihood-based method for making statistical comparisons of mortality profiles on a triangular graph, and we make available a cross-platform computer program that implements the method. Although we developed the method with mortality profiles in mind, in principle, it can be used to analyze any kind of artifact for which there are three distinct categories. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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