Week 12 - Dec. 11
This is the last day of Term and thus follows a Monday schedule. This is because we have a Fall reading week!
Location
Theme Replicability and Reproducibility
If you have time:
- Marwick, Ben. 2025. ‘Is archaeology a science? Insights and imperatives from 10,000 articles and a year of reproducibility reviews’ Journal of Archaeological Science 180: 106281 link
- Strupler, N. 2021 Re-discovering Archaeological Discoveries. Experiments with reproducing archaeological survey analysis, Internet Archaeology 56. link
The Plan
We’re going to be super relaxed today, and we’ll explore the following together:
Skill Building We’re giving Marwick et al’s advice a whirl here. In this exercise, we’re going to look at one student’s attempt at replicating research done by Marwick. We’re going to replicate the replication. The student, Hope Loiselle, chose to replicate one aspect of Marwick’s published work detailed in this article. Loieselle used Marwick’s data which he put online at the data sharing site Figshare. (There are many places to find archaeological data online!).
Open Marwick’s paper, and read his conclusions. Loiselle chose to focus on the lithic flakes from Tham Lod Area 1 and Ban Rai Area 3. Make a note about what Marwick says about these sites and how they compare. Then, following Loiselle, do the comparison for yourself, using a new notebook in Google Colab using the R kernel. Here’s some help.
Things to think about as we head into exams You might want to think about what all this digital archaeology might mean for you as a History student. It might be easier to imagine why archaeologists should want to make their data available for replication, restudy, or extension… but historians? Imagine the implications. How would history education have to change? How can this intersect with public facing work? Why might it matter?
Please have all of your module 3 research compendium materials in Github for review by the last day of term.