Exploring Ancient Vessel Morphology using Model Based Clustering

Music City Center 

How often do statisticians get to work on ancient pottery data from a 14th century archeological site in Greece?
I had the opportunity to collaborate with a group of archeologists to mine data on ancient ceramic vessels, which were retrieved from a sealed well deposit found within the archeological site. A model-based cluster analysis method, Gaussian Mixture Models Clustering, was applied to vessel dimensions to identify clusters, and tested stability of clusters using a series of non-parametric testes. The clusters were used to verify the morphology of the ceramic vessels conforming to the standard archeological vessel shapes identified by archeologists. This presentation will discuss the statistical modeling and the results, in application to uncovering clusters in the ancient ceramic vessel data.

Archeology

Gaussian Mixture Model

Model Based Clustering

Vessel Morphology 

Isolated Statisticians