Snodgrass {archdata}

House pits at the Mississippian Snodgrass site in Butler County, Missouri, U.S.A.

Description

Information on the size, location and contents of 91 house pits at the Snodgrass site which was occupied between about CE 1325-1420.

Usage

data(Snodgrass)

Format

A data frame with 91 observations on the following 15 variables.

East

East grid location of house in feet (excavation grid system)

South

East grid location of house in feet (excavation grid system)

Length

House length in feet

Width

House width in feet

Segment

Three areas within the site 1, 2, 3

Inside

Location within or outside the "white wall" Inside, Outside

Area

Area in square feet

Points

Number of projectile points

Abraders

Number of abraders

Discs

Number of discs

Earplugs

Number of earplugs

Effigies

Number of effigies

Ceramics

Number of ceramics

Total

Total Number of artifacts listed above

Types

Number of kinds of artifacts listed above

Details

The data from 91 house pits at the Snodgrass site were reported by Price and Giffin in 1979. The layout of the houses follows a grid pattern with the long axis oriented northeast surrounded by a fortification trench. There is also evidence of an interior wall that may have separated the houses inside that wall from those outside the wall. Price and Griffin use differences in house size and artifact composition to suggest that those differences may have reflected rank differences between the occupants of the two areas. That conclusion has been questioned on a number of grounds by Cogswell, et al (2001), but the data are still useful for illustrating a number of quantitative methods. The data come from the appendices except for the house locations which were estimated from the base map in Figure 10 (Price and Griffin 1979).

Source

Price, J. E. and J. B. Griffin. 1979. The Snodgrass Site of the Powers Phase of Southeast Missouri. Anthropological Papers. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 66.

References

Carlson, David L. 2017. Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Using R. Cambridge University Press, pp 171-183, 232-242.

Cogswell, J. W., M. J. O'Brien, and D. S. Glover. 2001. The Artifactual Content of Selected House Floors at Turner and Snodgrass. In Mississippian Community Organization: The Powers Phase in Southeastern Missouri, edited by M. J. O'Brien, pp 181–229. Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

Examples

data(Snodgrass)
plot(-South~East, Snodgrass, main="Snodgrass Site", pch=as.numeric(Inside)+4, asp=1)
legend("topleft", levels(Snodgrass$Inside), pch=5:6)
boxplot(Area~Inside, Snodgrass)