OK, we have data collected and normalised, questions are clear (?). Right now lets do some thoughts about statistics in archaeology.
“Statistics theory falls into two camps, frequentist and Bayesian. Frequentist is older and solid. Bayesian is newer, more flexible, and more exciting.”
More about this in a nice George Casella presentation. He mentioned the “likelihoodists” as well but did not concern about them.
frequentists stats
OK, lets play first with this one. Why not descriptive? Because I was sampling and data acquired are only the portion of all data available. Why first? Cause I know nothing about sexy Bayesian… :).
multivariate
Regarding multivariate stats one has to keep in mind:
they are generally divided into clustering and ordinal types. While clustering groups objects together according similarity in variables, ordinal is arranging them in graph according most valuable (significant) variables
all multivariate methods try to reduce the number of dimensions by searching those most valuable and defining the (hidden) dependencies among them (simplification of view on data)
table of objects with variables (dimensions) is always a starting point
we could analyse relationships among objects or among variables
every method has its limitation regarding the nature of data (e.g. quantitative, qualitative etc…)
every dataset