Novel Geometric Morphometric (GMM) Application to the Study of Bronze Age Tutuli

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the morphological diversity of the tutuli object group from the earlier Nordic Bronze Age (henceforth NBA) – an often over-looked object group despite their abundance specially, temporally and contextually. Currently, only a few studies of the morphological diversity of tutuli have been published, and these consist primarily of decade-old-typologies. The objective of this of this paper is first and foremost methodological, as we examine two research questions – concerning classification and periodisation – through a novel two-dimensional geometric morphometric (henceforth GMM) framework and subsequent multivariate analysis. Inherently we examine whether specific shapes conform to the classificatory of the Montelius typology, and whether a temporal relationship exists between types and shapes.

Design Space Constraints and the Cultural Taxonomy of European Final Palaeolithic Large Tanged Points: A Comparison of Typological, Landmark-Based and Whole-Outline Geometric Morphometric Approaches

“…Chacón et al, 2016;Serwatka, 2014) and elsewhere (Lycett, 2007), Holocene forager tools in South America (e.g. Charlin & González-José, 2012;Okumura & Araujo, 2014;Suárez & Cardillo, 2019) and later prehistoric metal axes (Wilczek et al, 2015), lances (Birch & Martinón-Torres, 2019) and adornments (Vestergaard & Hoggard, 2019) have all been subjected to geometric morphometric assessments, often leading to a substantial critique of established typologies. There is little methodological consistency across these emerging case studies, however, and rarely have such studies re-analysed different datasets comparatively (see Monnier & McNulty, 2010, for an exception), making it difficult to evaluate their conclusions independently of their methodological choices.…”

New Methods for Old Questions: The Use of Elliptic Fourier Analysis for the Formal Study of Palaeolithic Art

“…With regard to material culture such as lithic, bone, metallurgical or ceramic industries, GMM provides information such as the chronology or functional character of the site where these artefacts are found (Martínez-Carrillo et al, 2010). This method has been incorporated in recent studies to compare lithic or ceramic assemblages from the same site (Hashemi et al, 2021;Wang & Marwick, 2020), examine taxonomic variability (Matzig et al, 2021;Méndez-Quintas, 2022;Serwatka, 2015;Vestergaard & Hoggard, 2019), analyse the diachronic evolution of artefacts (Cortell-Nicolau et al, 2020;Hoggard et al, 2019;Loftus, 2022) or better understand the manufacturing design, level of standardisation, degree of specialisation and possible uses for which they were employed (Birch & Martinón-Torres, 2019;Chacón et al, 2016;Timbrell et al, 2022).…”