Hawikku and Kechiba:wa Mortuary Data: Material Accompaniments Raw Data and Multidimensional Scaling Scores

In the dissertation titled "Interactions with the Incorporeal in the Mississippian and Ancestral Puebloan Worlds," the author analyzed the Hawikku and Kechiba:wa Mortuary Material Accompaniment data set in an examination of the performance of mortuary ritual at Protohistoric period Zuni villages. The analysis of mortuary accompaniments and the larger consideration of mortuary ritual were designed to understand the identities of the spirits of the dead in Mississippian period villages of the Georgia Coast and in Protohistoric era Zuni villages. Please see the dissertation for details about the analysis and analysis procedures: http://core.tdar.org/project/380979.

The Hawikku and Kechiba:wa Mortuary Material Accompaniment data set was analyzed to evaluate if the living placed rare, unique, and/or noticeably symbolically-charged objects in burial features or near to burial features in association with remains of the deceased. The data were used in a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis, which helps to characterize the relative frequency of co-occurrence among mortuary artifacts (i.e., to characterize the relative commonality or rarity of artifacts and/or artifact sets). MDS is a multivariate statistical procedure that uses distance (i.e., similarity or dissimilarity) measures among all the cases (e.g., artifact types or mortuary assemblages) to place them in spatial relationships in a low dimensional graphical space. In this study, the procedure used calculated distance measures to place artifact types and mortuary assemblages in a space that represents the relative frequency of co-occurrence of artifacts in mortuary assemblages.

More specifically, this study conducted an MDS analysis of 1) the co-occurrence of artifact types in mortuary assemblages, and 2) the similarity and/or dissimilarity of complete mortuary assemblages (based on artifact type co-occurrence). The MDS analysis of artifact types placed artifact types that co-occured together frequently close to each other in a low dimensional space; it placed artifact types that do not occur together frequently far apart from each other in that space. The material accompaniment data were also used in a MDS of the complete mortuary assemblages. In this analysis, the MDS placed mortuary assemblages that contained many similar artifact types close to each other in a low dimensional space; it placed assemblages that contained different artifact types far apart from each other in that same space.

The Hawikku and Kechiba:wa material accompaniment analysis and MDS results are presented in the dissertation's Chapter 6 "Prehispanic Ancestral Spirits of Hawikku and Kechiba:wa." The graphical results of the MDS analyses are presented in Figures 6.12 and 6.13.

The Hawikku and Kechiba:wa inhumation mortuary material accompaniment data set that is curated here includes four data sheets: 1) the raw data used in the MDS analyses, 2) the artifact type binomial Z-score matrix that was passed into the artifact type MDS procedure, 3) the artifact type MDS scores and k-means cluster assignments, and 4) the mortuary assemblage MDS scores, k-means cluster assignments, and additional associated data. Please note that the data set does NOT include the mortuary assemblage binomial z-score matrix that was passed into the MDS procedure. The matrix was too large for inclusion.

The raw data record some mortuary feature variables and all mortuary artifact types in a presence/absence format. These data were first passed into the statistical package R and run through an R script that Matt Peeples wrote to calculate a binomial z-score matrix (Please see dissertation text for a description of binomial z-score calculation and characteristics). The matrix was then passed through the SPSS 20 MDS algorithm to create a graphical representation of the relative frequency of co-occurrence among artifact types. Please see the dissertation's Figure 6.12 for results. A similar procedure was followed to conduct the MDS analysis of complete mortuary assemblages. Please see the dissertation's Figure 6.13 for results.

The remaining data sheets include resulting metrics from the mortuary accompaniment MDS analyses. These metrics pertain to the production of the MDS graphical spaces and to the additional analysis/interpretation of that space. One data sheet contains each artifact type's MDS object score (i.e., each artifact type's coordinates for placement in the two-dimensional space). Second, it contains each artifact type's k-means cluster assignment within the coordinate space. Another data sheet contains each mortuary assemblage's (i.e., burial's) MDS object score and k-means cluster assignment. It also includes additional data that are useful for exploring that MDS space.