Width to Length Ratios in Shoshoni Handicraft

Keywords: t-test

Description

The data are width-to-length ratios of beaded rectangles used by the Shoshoni Indians of America to decorate their leather goods. One might ask whether the golden rectangle (for which the width-to-length ratio is 0.618) can be considered an aesthetic standard for the Shoshonis just as it was for the Greeks and the Egyptians.

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Data File (tab-delimited text)

Source

Dubois, Cora (ed.) (1960). Lowie's Selected Papers in Anthropology. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Larsen, R.J., and Marx, M.L., An Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and Its Applications 2nd Edition. Prentice-Hall, 1986. Case Study 1.2.2.

Analysis

One-sample t-Test

data: shoshoni
t = 2.0545, df = 19, p-value = 0.0539
alternative hypothesis: true mean is not equal to 0.618
95 percent confidence interval: 0.6172036 0.7037964
sample estimates: mean of x 0.6605

Wilcoxon signed-rank test

data: shoshoni
signed-rank normal statistic with correction Z = 1.6988, p-value = 0.0894
alternative hypothesis: true mu is not equal to 0.618