The Toumba building at Lefkandi: a statistical method for detecting a design-unit

This methodological paper uses the measurements of the Early Iron Age Toumba building at Lefkandi to study whether a single design-unit can be detected in the data set. Cosine quantogram analysis is used in the initial analysis of the building dimensions and, in the second phase, the relevance of the obtained results is calculated by using Monte Carlo computer simulations. A statistically significant unit of c. 49 cm can be isolated, but because of the very limited number of precise dimensions, this result should only be accepted with caution. The case study demonstrates how the complex statistical problem of deriving the lengths of possibly used design-units in ancient architecture can be approached; metrological analyses can only gain from employing appropriate quantitative methods.