José Manuel Blecua Prize: Statistics and computer science, tools to understand prehistory
Using statistical analysis and computer science to reduce the uncertainty when trying to place and understand prehistorical sites chronologically is the core of the innovating and transdisciplinary research by Maria Yuvero, awardee of José Manuel Blecua Prize to the top published article in one distinguished journal in the field of humanities and social sciences coming from a doctoral thesis. Yubero used the Monte Carlo simulation method -which belongs to statistics- to analyse the evolution of the archaeological sites from the Neolithic to the first Iron Age in the Besòs River basin.
Using statistical analysis and computer science to reduce the uncertainty when trying to place and understand prehistorical sites chronologically is the core of the innovating and transdisciplinary research by Maria Yuvero, awardee of José Manuel Blecua Prize to the top published article in one distinguished journal in the field of humanities and social sciences coming from a doctoral thesis. Yubero used the Monte Carlo simulation method -which belongs to statistics- to analyse the evolution of the archaeological sites from the Neolithic to the first Iron Age in the Besòs River basin.
“One of the typical problems when studying the past is the uncertainty of time; it is hard to set a specific chronological period to archaeological findings” says Yubero. “For instance, all settlements from Bronze Age are analysed as if these had been populated during all the period -more than a thousand years-, but we know each settlement was occupied during a certain time” says the researcher. Here is where the statistical simulations -those from Monte Carlo method come up: in particular, computer science is used to calculate thousands of possibilities and interpret those with data science. Yubero tells this giving an example, “we know each settlement was occupied for approximately a maximum of a hundred years, in a period that lasted five hundred years. Then, we create simulations in which the settlement would be created at the beginning, during the first century, others in which it was created in between centuries, and others in which it would be created at the end, in the fifth century. Afterwards this process is repeated for a thousand times for each settlement and that is how possible evolutions of the population in a certain area are made” says Yubero. After that, the results are compared to the existing evidence from excavations and classic analysis.
Yuberoʼs research reached some specific conclusions. For instance, the number of settlements in the basin of Besòs River increased during the first Iron Age. Also, the settlements were placed in more and more strategic areas, among other reasons, to benefit from the trade in the Mediterranean. This trend was integrated in what was detected in the other areas of this coast.
Yubero says there have been other cases in which the Montecarlo method was used in archaeological settlements, for example in the University College London or the University of Cambridge. “The quantitative analysis in archaeology is enjoying an explosion of innovative methods and the research we carried out is framed within this renovating trend”, she says.
Yuberoʼs doctoral thesis, supervised by Xavier Rubio Campillo and F. Javier López Cachero, gave way to an article published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.
Although Maria Yubero is not currently working on research but in an international consultancy, she notes that “all tools and methodologies I learnt during my doctoral studies have been useful in my current job, since we work with partial data many times, and these need a context to be interpreted”.