  Researchers working in lattice field theory constitute an established
community since the early 1990s, and around the same time the online
open-access e-print repository arXiv was created. The fact that this field has
a specific arXiv section, hep-lat, which is comprehensively used, provides a
unique opportunity for a statistical study of its evolution over the last three
decades. We present data for the number of entries, $E$, published papers, $P$,
and citations, $C$, in total and separated by nations. We compare them to six
other arXiv sections (hep-ph, hep-th, gr-qc, nucl-th, quant-ph, cond-mat) and
to two socio-economic indices of the nations involved: the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) and the Education Index (EI). We present rankings, which are
based either on the Hirsch Index H, or on the linear combination $\Sigma = E +
P + 0.05 C$. We consider both extensive and intensive national statistics, i.e.
absolute and relative to the population or to the GDP.
