Seriality in material culture by Geometric Morphometrics (2024)

Geometric Morphometrics of gold wild boar discovered in the Arzhan-2 tomb, Tuva

In the field of material culture, seriality refers to the serial production of nearly the same object in terms of shape and size, yielding visually identical artefacts. Subtle variations may nevertheless occur, depending on the technologies used, or the number and reliability of moulds, for example. Geometric morphometrics (GM) based on landmark analysis, along with accompanying statistical techniques, provides methods well-suited for identifying small but archaeologically significant variations in shape and size within such datasets. In this study, we exemplify the efficiency of GM in a context of seriality using a large series of centimetric-sized golden wild boars decorating a case for bow and arrows, discovered in the Arzhan-2 barrow of the early Scythian time.
This supplementary material accompanies the aforementioned manuscript and contains the following elements:

Code: The code is provided in the form of an R project.
Images: The images selected for the analysis.
Landmark Coordinates: The landmark coordinates for three operators.
Objective
Running this code reproduces the analyses and figures reported in the paper.

archaeology (humanities), mathematics, applied (mathematics), statistics & probability (mathematics), multidisciplinary sciences