Predicting Similarity in Material Culture among New Guinea Villages from Propinquity and Language.

Material culture; Language & languages; Contingency tables; Log-linear models; Mathematical statistics; Anthropology; Villages; Distances

This paper fits a specific Log-linear model to a contingency table containing the frequencies of 47 artifact types across 31 village sites (in the north coast of New Guinea. The model provides a precise answer to the question raised by Welsch, Terrell, and Nodalski (1992, namely, how much of the variability in this distribution is accounted for by distance and how much by language. We measure the total amount of variability in the contingency table with a model of quasi-independence (i.e., the expected frequencies based on column and row totals. Using scale values from a previous analysis by Moore and Romney (1994), we then ask what proportion of this variability can be accounted for by (i) the scaled distances, (2) the scaled languages, and (3) the scaled distances and languages taken together. Results show that distance and language taken separately account for just over a quarter of the variability, whereas taken together they account for an additional 10%. The results support the previous analysis of Moore and Romney that finds both distance and language to be related to artifact type distribution and contradict Welsch et al's notion that language is unrelated to that distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]