Is archaeology a science? 🧪

Here's my new paper that has a go at answering this question by analysing 10,000 journal articles:

https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1lHjN_6yUMDGcY

#archaeology #science

Our new paper reports a complete Quina technological system in the 60-50 ka assemblage at Longtan, Southwest China

Here is our plain English summary […]

Code and data are online here: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10693325

As far as we know, such a comprehensive analysis conducted within a single Bayesian framework has never before been attempted, and marks a significant methodological milestone for the study of cultural evolution.

Given this innovative approach, we placed […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

We also used skyline analysis to examine birth, death, diversification, and turnover rates across the four major climatic warming and cooling events during this timeframe, based on the Greenland ice-core event stratigraphy.

We used a fossilized birth-death sampling process model to infer time-scaled Bayesian phylogenies, utilizing the projectile point outline shape as continuous characters (first use of this in archaeology that we are aware of).

New paper! Lead by David Matzig, we used a state-of-the-art Bayesian phylodynamic framework to explore the evolution of projectile point shapes during the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic (approximately 15-11ka BP).

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240321