Week 12 - Dec. 7

Location

Theme Replicability and Reproducibility

Have Read for Today

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 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2025.106281 alternate link
Strupler, N. 2021 Re-discovering Archaeological Discoveries. Experiments with reproducing archaeological survey analysis, Internet Archaeology 56. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.56.6

The Plan

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:

# Hope Loiselle's Code
# your task: annotate it with what you think
# she's trying to do; and compare it with
# Marwick's original paper: what aspect of his analysis
# does this bit of code address, and do your findings
# match up with his?
library(curl)
library(stringr)
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)

library(tidyverse)
flakes_TL <- read.csv(curl("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/benmarwick/teaching-replication-in-archaeology/refs/heads/master/analysis/supplementary-materials/submitted-assigments/Hope-Loiselle/Tham_Lod_Area_1_lithics-1.csv"), header = TRUE )
flakes_BR <- read.csv(curl("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/benmarwick/teaching-replication-in-archaeology/refs/heads/master/analysis/supplementary-materials/submitted-assigments/Hope-Loiselle/Ban_Rai_Area_3_lithics-1.csv"), header = TRUE) 

##- new cell

# dorsal cortex and dorsal scars
TL_dorsal <-
  flakes_TL %>%
  select(DORSAL_COR, DORSAL_SCA, SITE, EXCAVATION)

BR_dorsal <-
  flakes_BR %>%
  select(DORSAL_COR, DORSAL_SCA, SITE, EXCAVATION)

TL_BR_dorsal <- bind_rows(TL_dorsal, BR_dorsal)

##- new cell

ggplot(TL_BR_dorsal, aes(SITE, DORSAL_COR)) +
  geom_boxplot()

dorsal_cortex_proportion <-
  TL_BR_dorsal %>%
  group_by(SITE, EXCAVATION, DORSAL_COR) %>%
  tally() %>%
  mutate(DORSAL_COR = ifelse(DORSAL_COR == 0, "zero", "not zero")) %>%
  group_by(SITE, EXCAVATION, DORSAL_COR) %>%
  tally() %>%
  filter(!is.na(DORSAL_COR)) %>%
  spread(DORSAL_COR, n) %>%
  mutate(dorsal_proportion = zero / (`not zero` + zero))

ggplot(dorsal_cortex_proportion, aes(SITE, dorsal_proportion)) +
  geom_boxplot()

Having done that, read Loiselle’s conclusion (available in the repository here; it’s in Word format, so hit the ‘download’ icon to grab it then open it in Word).

Compare your results with Loiselle’s work and Marwick’s paper. Do you think his conclusion stands up? How about Loiselle’s?

Homework By the last day of term, have your research compendium for this week complete and in github. You might want to think about what this all 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.