0000000000246855
AUTHOR
I. Schwidetzky
Data Banks and Multivariate Statistics in Physical Anthropology
In recent decades, the fields of administration and economy, the press and - last but not least - the sciences have been characterized by an “explosion of knowledge”, and, as a consequence, by the problem of managing the rapidly increasing mass of information. It has been estimated that knowledge doubles each five years, and even that the interval of doubling seems to decrease. The main response to this challenge are computerized and structured data collections called data banks. “Data banks are systems of data collections which are organized according to logical and/or formal criteria; they should make it possible to reproduce the data of the total collection arranged according to differen…
Comparative statistical studies on the physical anthropology of the late Medieval period (A.D. 1000–1500)
Continuing previous studies on preceding temporal periods, a total of 162 skeletal series from the late Medieval period are analysed. The dendrogram reveals an east cluster as in the other periods but a west cluster is not evident possibly because western Europe is represented by very few series. Moreover, we find a Scandinavian and a Turk cluster. Regional or ethnic pooling of the original series gives an affinity structure which is more influenced by geographic proximity than by ethnic relation. This structure predominantly reflects differentiations of skull width and length and to a lesser degree of facial height. The diachronic trend appears again, but in this period there is only a sli…
Anthropology as a natural science
On the basis of materials collected by the research project System Analysis of Anthropology (SAA) the author discusses problems of the structure and relationships of biological anthropology. o (1) In the eastern, southeastern and southern European countries anthropology is strictly defined as natural science (source: conversation lexicons); also in Germany and some neighbouring countries other anthropologies, particularly the philosophical one, exist and have increased in recent years; a third group is represented by the Anglo-Saxon anthropology which comprises social and cultural as well as physical (Figure 1). The proportion of physical anthropological papers in anthropological periodical…
Comparative statistical studies on the anthropology of the Iron Age (last millennium B.C.)
Abstract Extending previous statistical studies on the anthropology of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, anthropological material from the Iron Age (1000-0) was compiled and condensed into 71 series (population samples). Penrose distances were calculated on the basis of 10 skull measurements. The dendrogram consisting of 49 larger series shows a division into a west- and an east-cluster. The west-cluster can be broken down into a northern, entirely European section, and into a southern subcluster, stretching from Sardinia to Pakistan. The east-cluster differs from the west-cluster above all in the larger width measurements, as in the case with the north-east and south-west complexes in the Neo…