A recently resolved debate centred on the interpretation of a major set of INAA data that was based on Olmec ceramics from Mexico. In an attempt to answer questions arising from the debate, this paper discusses the effect of numbers of samples chosen for data interpretation. It also presents interpretations of the ceramic data set based on a bivariate data-splitting approach and compares the results of this with the multivariate analysis approaches employed by the initial publishers of the data. and their laboratories are closed. We would therefore add the plea that there be a revival of the publication in papers of group means and standard deviations, or group means and their percentage errors, as was common in the first decades of archaeometry, together with the safe long-term storage of data, as is practised at MURR.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.