Ernest Witte Cemetery, Austin, County, Texas, U.S.A.

Description

Sex, age, burial group, location, and burial orientation and direction facing from the Ernest Witte site, a Late Archaic cemetery in Texas (Hall 1981).

Usage

data(EWBurials)

Format

A data frame with 49 observations on the following 7 variables.

Group

Cemetery group, a factor with levels 1, 2

North

North grid location of the burial in meters (excavation grid system)

West

East grid location of the burial in meters (excavation grid system)

Age

Age category, a factor with levels Fetus, Infant, Child, Adolescent, Young Adult, Adult, Middle Adult, Old Adult

Sex

a factor with levels Female, Male

Direction

circular data in degrees indicating the direction of the individual measured from the head along the vertebral column

Looking

circular data in degrees indication the direction the individual is facing

Goods

Presence or absence of grave goods

Details

The Ernest Witte site in Austin County, Texas contains four burial groups from different time periods. Group 1 includes 60 interments and that occurred between about 2000 and 1200 BCE. Group 2 is the largest with 148 interments. The burials in this group were interred between about CE 200 and 500. Groups 3 and 4 include only 10 and 13 interments and date to CE 500 to 1500, but are not included in this data set which was taken from Appendix II (Hall 1981). Two of the variables, direction and looking, are circular data and require package circular. Hall (2010) provides a summary of the site and its significance.

Source

Hall, G. D. 1981. Allen's Creek: A Study in the Cultural Prehistory of the Lower Brazos River Valley. The University of Texas at Austin. Texas Archeological Survey. Texas. Research Report No. 61.

References

Carlson, David L. 2017. Quantitative Methods in Archaeology Using R. Cambridge University Press, pp 350-357.

Hall, G. D. 2010. Ernest Witte site. Handbook of Texas Online https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/ernest-witte-site. Texas State Historical Association.

Examples

data(EWBurials)
xtabs(~Age+Sex+Group, EWBurials)

if (requireNamespace("circular", quietly = TRUE)) {
  plot(EWBurials$Direction)
} else {
  cat("This example requires package circular.\n")
}