Application Of Geometric Morphometrics In Archaeology

This paper focuses on the history,theory and application of geometric morphometrics in the two archaeological fields of physical anthropology and lithic research,and discusses some related issues.The text is divided into six chapters.Chapter 1 focuses on a brief review of the history of morphology research and is divided into three subsections.The first part describes the historical roots of morphometry in the Archaic period and the early development of modern taxonomy;the second part introduces lithic typology and racial anthropology in archaeological morphology and the budding of morphological quantification in this period;and the third part briefly describes the history,theory and main drawbacks of traditional morphometrics.In Chapter 2,some basic concepts and methods involved in the practical application of geometric morphometry are elaborated..The basic concepts include: landmarks and semilandmarks,Procrustes method,shape and shape space,thin-plate splines,and the elliptic Fourier transform based on Procrustes' alignment;the basic methods focus on the acquisition of 2D and3 D data for geometric morphometrics and the most commonly used method of principal component analysis based on tangent space.Geometric morphometry in physical anthropology research is introduced in Chapter 3,which is divided into three subsections.The first part introduces the history of geometric morphometrics in physical anthropology;the second part introduces the applications of geometric morphometrics in gender and age estimation,ethnicity and ancestry estimation,and other areas of quantitative morphometric analysis in physical anthropology;the third part introduces the emergence of "virtual anthropology" in anthropological research in the 21 st century.Geometric morphometry in the analysis of stone artefacts is presented in Chapter 4,divided into three subsections.The first part presents the history of geometric morphometrics in the field of stone artefact analysis;the second part introduces the application of geometric morphometrics in the fields of morphometric quantification and digital storage of stone artefacts,analysis of stone tooling techniques and morphological analysis;the third part focuses on some of the reasons for the slow progress of geometric morphometry in the field of stone artefact analysis.Chapter 5 complements the two geometric morphometrics-related issues and is divided into two parts.The first part introduces some historical concepts that have arisen in the classification of morphometrics that are prone to ambiguity and suggests some suggestions for standardising the use of terminology.In the second part,the frequency of the term "geometric morphometrics" in international archaeological journals over the last 20 years is investigated and a brief statistical analysis is made to reveal the trend and recognition of geometric morphometrics in the international arena from the perspective of data.Chapter 6 concludes with a few key directions for the future development of geometric morphometrics and some suggestions for the development of geometric morphometric methods in China.