STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF CHEMICAL COMPOSITIONAL DATA AND THE COMPARISON OF ANALYSES

Recent statistical work on approaches to analysing compositional data - where variables sum to a constant for each row of a data matrix - may encounter difficulties when applied to data of the kind typically arising in scientific archaeology. The reason is that results obtained may be unsatisfactory from a substantive viewpoint for identifiable technical reasons. This paper explores and illustrates some possible resolutions of the problem. A feature of the approach used is to analyse subsets of the variables on separate scales. A synthesis of the results obtained from separate analyses is essential and the use of multiple correspondence analysis for this purpose is illustrated.