IF Flint THEN Bones – Applying SAS® Enterprise Miner™ to archaeology

What connection did SAS Enterprise Miner unearth between flint and bones? Zachi Zweig recently shared his research on this topic at SAS Forum Israel 2008.

During graduate study in the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, he found that although data mining tools are heavily used for marketing, they could also be of great help in social science research, such as his own field of archaeology.

SAS Enterprise Miner is suited for users at all statistical levels, allowing someone who is not a professional statistician to take advantage of the wide range of analytical technologies that exist today, asserts Zweig.

Data mining offered novel insights into various correlations between attributes, some of which were obvious once noticed but had not been previously made because no one thought of checking the correlations.

According to Zweig, "This is the main advantage of data mining. You discover hidden (and even not very hidden) patterns in the data that are exposed because this technology is capable of analyzing great numbers of variables."

His research on sites from biblical times yielded several interesting results, each of which can now be a subject for further study.  For example, one finding was that wherever flint tools were located, bones were always found. But the correlation did not apply in the reverse: The presence of bones was not always accompanied by flint tools.

In the Iron Age, flint tools were thought to have been used solely as sickles, but this finding suggests that they may also have been used as knives for cutting flesh, indicating certain eating habits. In the Bible, the word for flint tools appears only twice and only in the context of circumcision. Since ancient societies tended to reject advanced technologies when engaging in cultic practices, it could be that in the Iron Age flint tools were used instead of metal tools for certain cultic habits and not just as sickles.

Zweig will be publishing more on the results of his archaeological data mining in the near future. You can learn more about his methodology here.

Cover of the research paper with abstract title and the name of the author who presented it at SAS Forum Israel.