Supplement: The Development of Social Inequality in the Carpathian Basin between 5200 and 1000 BCE. A quantitative study on Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age cemeteries and methodological considerations.

Data Structure

This repository contains the supplementary material of the Thesis (2024) "The development of social inequality in the Carpathian Basin between 5200 and 1000 BCE. A quantitative study on Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age cemeteries and methodological considerations." by Fynn Wilkes (Kiel university).

The online Supplement consists of the following file spaces and files:

The first file space, “Supplement A to E,” contains the following items, each with numerous subitems:

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• Supplement A: Results of statistical analyses
• Supplement B: Significance test results
• Supplement C: Object class values per site; list of functional groups and object assignments; and list of generalized material types
• Supplement D: Chronological data
• Supplement E: Catalogue of reclassified burial inventories and normalized index values per burial
• Supplement F: Additional Plots of Giniall, Ginilow, Giniupper, GEM[0], GEM[1], GEM[2] and Shareupper
These supplements contain information that was crucial for the analysis of the burial sites in this study, as well as results derived from this analysis that could not be fully included in the tables and figures of the main text. Supplement E is provided in multiple formats, as it contains the raw data tables for the individual burial sites, including reclassified grave goods and additional checks for potential errors that may still persist in the database. These data form the basis of the analyses presented in the thesis.

The second file space, “Burial Database,” contains the raw burial database in two formats. The original database was developed and populated in MS Access and is included in its raw state. It contains both German and English terminology and includes all original data fields, including those that were initially planned but could not be populated consistently due to heterogeneous source data. In general, information on site, grave (grave pit: depth, length, width), burial (anthropological age and sex, orientation, disturbance, phase), and inventory (material, type, quantity) has been entered consistently and uniformly. Note that only information explicitly documented in the textual catalogues of the original site publications was used.
Since the Access database is a proprietary file format that may not be supported in the future and may only be usable with specific software versions, a SQLite version of the database has also been created. SQLite is open source and suitable for long-term data archiving. An HTML/JavaScript-based frontend for data access (SQLite_Database_Viewer_FWilkes.html) has been added to the Supplement. The SQLite database represents a reduced and translated version of the original database; however, it includes all information used in the thesis.

The third file space, “R Code and Data Frames (Examples),” includes R code as well as example data files required to run the code. Note that the Giniall value reported in the thesis, which is derived from the median of Ginidist and Ginidist+undist, was calculated in Excel and subsequently added manually to the data frames used for plotting and analysis in R. The code provided here calculates Giniall directly from the social index values of the burials per site. As a result, running the code with the example data may produce slightly different results. Calculations of the asymptotic standard error (ASE) and confidence intervals (CI) were conducted primarily in Excel. The ASE was calculated individually in R, after which the Gini index values and ASE were used to derive the confidence intervals in Excel (see Supplement A).


Description File: "Database_FWilkes_PhD.accdb"

This file is an MS Access Database. In this database all the information gathered of the cemeteries are stored. Gaps in IDs are due to deleted datasets that have been collected or partially collected but havent been included into the analysis. The database has 4 levels: Site, Grave, Burial and Inventory.
Site level: All general information regarding the site, references, phases, dating are stored here. Every site has a unique Site ID.
Grave level: General information regarding the grave, its identifier (Name) and dimensions are stored here. Each grave has a unique Grave ID and is assigned via the Site ID to a site.
Burial level: The information regarding disturbance, orientation, positioning, age, sex of an deceased individual is recorded in this level. Each burial has a unique Burial ID and is assigned via the Grave ID to a Grave and via the Site ID to a Site.
Inventory level: The information regarding the grave goods are stored on this level. While the information might be differnt in quality and extend, the main features are recorded for every grave good, which are: material, object type and number of objects.

Tables for References and Isotopes are connected via the Site ID and the Grave ID to the respective sites.

MT_XXX - are Main tables, storing information gathered from literature.
VT_XXX - are Value tables, storing standardized values which are used in some field of the Main tables.