Jacqui,

You could try the following, both of which I have used and are okay:

Mike Fletcher and Gary R. Lock. Digging numbers : elementary statistics for archaeologists. Oxford University Committee for archaeology monographs ; 33 Oxford : Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1991

Stephen Shennan. Quantifying archaeology. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c1988

I should think that there would be no reason why you shouldn't group together all of the skeletal elements on each side as there is no preservational reason for a difference between the sides. Obviously you couldn't compare left femurs with right astragali, but if you are comparing all the left vs all the right elements I think it should be valid.

Hope this helps

Fiona Beglane

Jacqui Mulville <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I have an (another) assemblage that seems to be biased to one side of a species.
I have looked back at Windmill Hill (Edwards and Horne 1997), the only other
example I know of sidedness but the claims on an over-abundance of sides of a
couple of particular elements were not supported by statistical analysis.

I have a range of elements, which I can use to produce a minimum number for
each side - what springs to my mind is a chi-squared test expecting equal
numbers of each element - but can I group all the different elements together to
test them?

So any suggestions please as to how to analyse many elements from a species to
look for statistical significance of the over representation of a side?
Previously I have only had one element (i.e. femur) to query which seems easier
to me.

All/any help welcome - has anyone written a book on statistics for
zooarchaeologists yet? It would be jolly useful.

jacqui

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