Goals for this week
This week, I want to spend some time thinking about how archaeologists make their data available - or not - for replication of their studies. After all, excavation is destruction.
Listen
You’ve did it gang; you’ve reached the end. This week’s podcast features three amazing digital archaeologists, and one evil villain.
Right-click and save-as this link to download the audio file
Read
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
More, if you’re interested:
Strupler, N. 2021 Re-discovering Archaeological Discoveries. Experiments with reproducing archaeological survey analysis, Internet Archaeology 56. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.56.6
Do
- First, we’ll take a quick look at how the Archaeological Data Service makes data available
- Then we’ll try to reproduce someone else’s analysis
These are fairly quick exercises, which is why I felt that two podcast episodes wouldn’t be that onerous.
Record and Reflect
Your github repository is where you will deposit all of the artefacts you make for this course, including your reflections. Depositing everything you make gives me a vision of your process and learning, so I encourage you to be expansive. Make sure to ‘invite user shawngraham’ to your repository so that I may view it.
- As you’ve done for every week, make another notes.md entry and put it in your github repository for week 7.
- In your reflective journal, drawing on your annotations of what you’ve read, your notes from what you’ve listened to, and the work you’ve done (both the successes and the not-quite-successes), discuss 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?
Begin the reflection by quoting (w/ citation) one sentence from the readings that resonates with you and why. You might select something that is personally meaningful, or leaves you confused, or makes you happy, or intrigues you to know more… etc. Put your journal in your repo.
Log Your Work
You can log the link to your repository in this form