NMC459H1

Advanced Data Science Applications in Archaeology

Digital technology and “big data” are transforming not only the ways in which archaeologists present and communicate their research, but also increasingly the ways they collect and analyze data. Modern archaeology is also becoming progressively more multi-disciplinary, and reliant on the analysis of growing bodies of disparate forms of data, both archaeological data and data from related fields. This course exposes students to common approaches to the analysis of archaeological data (e.g. settlement scaling theory, summed probability distributions, agent-based modelling, etc.) and helps them develop hands-on skills in these critical techniques in archaeological data analysis. Where possible, this course will focus on case studies from the Near Eastern world.