Morphometry of Middle Bronze Age palstaves by discrete cosine transform.

9 pages; International audience; The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is a Fourier-related transform widely used in signal processing and well suited to the analysis of open outlines. This method was applied here to evaluate the discrimination power of the inner lateral rib for two palstave populations dating from the Middle Bronze Age, excavated in northwest France. A corpus of almost 400 palstaves (bronze axes) of the Breton and Norman types was processed, and compared to specimens found at Sermizelles in Burgundy. The procedure is robust and produces a discrimination in good agreement with the traditional typology. Besides the definition of a ‘standard' shape for each population, the morp…