Hello Zooarchers,
I am trying to put together a research project at the moment looking at metrical data from grey literature and am coming up with a problem.
When I submit a report I include a tabulated form of the metrics which for each individual bone lists out the results for that individual bone e.g. GL, Bp etc. so that all the data from the one bone is together. Looking through grey literature I am finding a lot of reports that only include summary data e.g. for GL they would give the max, min, mean and std. dev. This is understandable in final publication where space is often at a premium, but I was surprised that the 'full' grey literature reports were being submitted in this way. From the point of view of looking at changes over time and space
this makes the data much less useful to work with - and getting hold of the original data might be difficult where the zooarchaeologist may have left the country/profession.
Does anyone have any thoughts? eg. do you or do you not include the full data in the report? Any good reasons why this data should not be included? Any thoughts on how this summary data might be used in a valid way?
Thank you all
Fiona
