Beyond Chronology, Using Bayesian Inference to Evaluate Hypotheses in Archaeology

Archaeologists frequently use probability distributions and null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) to assess how well survey, excavation, or experimental data align with their hypotheses about the past. Bayesian inference is increasingly used as an alternative to NHST and, in archaeology, is most commonly applied to radiocarbon date estimation and chronology building. This article demonstrates that…

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A New Approach to the Quantitative Analysis of Bone Surface Modifications: the Bowser Road Mastodon and Implications for the Data to Understand Human-Megafauna Interactions in North America

Toward the end of the Pleistocene, the world experienced a mass extinction of megafauna. In North America these included its proboscideans—the mammoths and mastodons. Researchers in conservation biology, paleontology, and archaeology have debated the role played by human predation in these extinctions. They point to traces of human butchery, such as cut marks and other…

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