Statistical shape analysis in archaeology

Ian L. Dryden,
School of Mathematical Sciences,
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, U.K.
Abstract
A brief introduction to statistical shape analysis is given and the analysis of a set of iron age brooches
is carried out. The application illustrates the use of statistical shape analysis in archaeology. This article is
a summary of a presentation at the workshop Spatial Statistics in Archaeology held at the University of
Chieti, Italy, July, 2000.

Introduction
A wide variety of archaeological applications involve the study of the geometrical properties of
objects. In particular one often needs to measure, describe and compare the size and shapes of
archaeological artefacts, with a view to relating size and shape to sets of covariates such as age,
location, group etc. By shape we mean the geometrical properties of an object after location, rotation and scale information has been removed (Kendall, 1984). Traditional methods in archaeology
have involved taking measurements on specimens, such as lengths and angles, and then submitting
these to multivariate analysis. Such methods can be powerful for discrimination and classication,
but often geometrical properties of the object are lost. By far the majority of size and shape analysis applications in archaeology use such methods, for example see Baxter (1994). An alternative
approach is to use the full geometry of the conguration and carry out statistical analysis in the
non-Euclidean shape space. Dryden and Mardia (1998), Bookstein (1991), Small (1996), Kendall
et al. (1999), and Lele and Richstmeier (2001) provide overviews of the subject. Early pioneering
work in the area was carried out by Bookstein (1996) and Kendall (1984), and indeed Kendall used
an archaeological application (locations of megalithic standing stones) as a motivation.

Shape analysis of iron age brooches

In order to illustrate some of the methods of statistical shape analysis we consider the analysis of
some iron age brooches collected from M nsingen in Switzerland, which have been analysed by
u
Small (1996) and Le and Small (1999).
The data are presented on page 93 of Small (1996). Landmarks are key points of correspondence
on each object and we locate
landmarks on each brooch. Landmarks 1 and 2 are the left
and right end points, landmarks 3 and 4 are the junctions of the middle section with the lower
and upper parts respectively, and nally landmark 5 is the position of the decorative attachment
between landmarks 1 and 4. The size of the conguration can be taken as the centroid size which

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Figure 1: The 28 brooches are displayed using (left) Bookstein registration and (right) Procrustes
registration.

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Bookstein () and Procrustes ( ) means

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Figure 2: The mean shape estimates based on Bookstein co-ordinates (solid line) and Procrustes
co-ordinates (broken line).
is the square root of the sum of squared distances from each landmark to the centroid. Other size
measures such as square root of area or overall length could be used, but centroid size is often
statistically convenient.
Some suitable shape co-ordinates are Bookstein (1986) shape co-ordinates for two-dimensional
data, where the brooches are translated, rotated and rescaled so that landmarks 1 and 2 are sent
to
and
. The remaining co-ordinates after this transformation are called the
Bookstein shape co-ordinates. In Figure 1 (left) we see the Bookstein shape co-ordinates of the
28 brooches. One approach to shape analysis is to carry out multivariate analysis with these coordinates, for example a mean shape estimate is simply the arithmetic mean of the Bookstein
co-ordinates. Inference is dependent on the choice of baseline, although for small variations the
baseline choice makes little difference provided the two points are not close together. Also, articial correlations are induced into the co-ordinates by the sharing of baseline points, so for example
principal components analysis might be misleading (Kent, 1994).
 


 


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Figure 3: The rst three PCs for the brooch data. Each row shows the effect of the PC with
brooches displayed at -3 (leftmost), -2, -1, 0 (middle), 1, 2, 3 (rightmost) standard deviations along
the PC away from the mean. Rows 1 to 3 show PCs 1 to 3 respectively.
An alternative approach is to use Procrustes analysis, where the congurations are translated, rotated, rescaled to minimise an overall sum of squares difference. In Figure 1 (right) we see the
brooches matched by Procrustes analysis. The arithmetic mean of the Procrustes registered data is
then an estimate of mean shape. In Figure 2 we display both the Bookstein and Procrustes means
and it can be seen that there is very little difference. The structure of shape variability can be
investigated in Procrustes tangent space which is approximately the same as investigating the covariance matrix of the registered congurations. For two-dimensional data with
landmarks
there are
dimensions of shape variability. In Figure 3 we display the rst three principal
components (PCs) which are calculated in Procrustes tangent space and then projected back to gure space. An advantage with the geometrical method over traditional multivariate analysis is that
the PCs can be plotted and interpreted more easily. The rst PC accounts of 58.6% of the shape
variability and primarily involves movement of landmark 2 away from the rest with landmark 4
moving to the left. The second PC accounts for 22.0% of the shape variability and measures a
shear (wide short brooches versus narrow tall brooches). The third PC accounts for 13.2% of the
variability and measures the relative displacement of landmarks 4 and 5.

We can carry out multivariate analysis of the PC scores and carry out suitable tests on the data.
For example we may be interested in the relationship between the shape and the age of the brooch.
Each brooch is categorised into ve ages from 1 (older) to 5 (newer). In Figure 4 we see plots of
PC score 2 versus PC score 1. We see that PC 1 appears to be related to the age of the brooch. We
gather together ages 1,2,3 into a group of older brooches and ages 4,5 into a group of newer
older brooches and
newer brooches. The within group
brooches, with a total of
PCs in the two groups are fairly similar, so we assume that the shape covariance matrix is the same
in both groups. Carrying out a Hotellings
test of the older and newer brooches having the





 


 

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Figure 4: Plot of PC scores 2 versus 1. The labels of each point are the ages (1 older to 5 newer).

 

same mean shapes, the test statistic is

and
. Hence there is
some evidence that the two groups have different mean shapes. In order to investigate how the two
groups differ we plot a square grid on the older mean shape in Figure 5 and transform to the newer
mean shape with a thin-plate spline interpolation of the grid (Bookstein, 1989). The difference has
been doubled in order to make the shape change clearer. A major change is that landmark 2 has
come in more to the rest and landmark 4 is further to the right of landmarks 3, 5, which is a similar
shape change to that captured by PC 1. Thus, the major difference between the means is in the PC
1 direction, as was seen in the different PC 1 scores of Figure 4. Le and Small (1999) considered
shape analysis of the same data using the rst four landmarks and applied multidimensional scaling
to pairwise Procrustes distances. The broad conclusions from both analyses are similar.


Conclusion
The brooches application illustrates some of the exciting possibilities for geometrical shape analysis in archaeology. Developments in shape analysis have been substantial in the past decade, and
routine analysis of datasets is possible using software such as the Shape-R package
http://www.maths.nott.ac.uk./ ild/Shape-R

Three dimensional landmark shape analysis is also relatively straightforward to carry out, although
the geometry of the shape spaces is more complicated than the two dimensional case. Current
research in shape analysis includes the development of methodology for the analysis of curve, surface and image data, all of which have important applications in archaeology and other disciplines.
Some recent advances are given in the volume edited by Mardia and Aykroyd (2001).

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TPS grid (older to newer)

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Figure 5: Grids displaying the Procrustes mean shape for the older group (left) with an interpolating thin-plate spline deformation on the newer group (right).

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