After a heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, probability sampling became much less visible in archaeological literature as it came under assault from the post-processual critique and the widespread adoption of “full-coverage survey.” After 1990, published discussion of probability sampling rarely strayed from sample-size issues in analyses of artifacts along with plant and animal remains, and most textbooks and archaeological training limited sampling to regional survey and did little to equip new generations of archaeologists with this critical aspect of research design. A review of the last 20 years of archaeological literature indicates a need for deeper and broader archaeological training in sampling; more precise usage of terms such as “sample”; use of randomization as a control in experimental design; and more attention to cluster sampling, stratified sampling, and nonspatial sampling in both training and research.

This article discusses the available sources of information on the value and volume of Peru’s exports and estimates the current value of exports, the index of export prices and the quantum of exports using a wide variety of sources. By relying on several sources, I estimate the first complete series of the current value of exports for Peru for 1830-1930. Importantly, I adjust other studies’ estimates by taking into account the deficiencies of foreign sources and by distinguishing between exports of specie and of minerals. The estimations show that exports experienced substantial growth in the 1850s and 1860s, during the Guano Era. Exports stagnated in the 1870s and dropped during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) before recovering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially during World War I.

Historiography has payed less attention to imports than exports from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I. On the one hand, this is explained by the crucial and more visible part that exports played in fostering economic growth. On the other, the reason why imports have been less studied is the high level of disaggregation of the data available. In this paper, we analyse the official Argentine statistics as the main source for a reconstruction of imports. Then, we recalculate the balance of trade using our corrected export series. Additionally, we propose a research agenda based on gaps in the specialised literature and the possibilities given by the use of the official statistics.

This article examines how poverty came to be identified as the key category of the new social question in Argentina during its post-1983 transition to democracy. It pays special attention to the conformation of an expert group at the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, INDEC), which focused on the construction of statistical instruments aimed at describing the social reality of poverty. Through practices of objectification and classification carried out by those experts, poverty was made into a measurable object, at the same time that it was publicly instituted as a political-moral problem and as an object of state action.

Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.