In archaeology, we are accustomed to investing great effort into collecting data from fieldwork, museum collections, and other sources, followed by detailed description, rigorous analysis, and in many cases ending with publication of our findings in short, highly concentrated reports or journal articles. Very often, these publications are all that is visible of this lengthy process, and even then, most of our journal articles are only accessible to scholars at institutions paying subscription fees to the journal publishers. While this traditional model of the archaeological research process has long been effective at generating new knowledge about our past, it is increasingly at odds with current norms of practice in other sciences. Often described as ‘open science’, these new norms include data stewardship instead of data ownership, transparency in the analysis process instead of secrecy, and public involvement instead of exclusion. While the concept of open science is not new in archaeology (e.g., see Lake 2012 and other papers in that volume), a less transparent model often prevails, unfortunately. We believe that there is much to be gained, both for individual researchers and for the discipline, from broader application of open science practices. In this article, we very briefly describe these practices and their benefits to researchers. We introduce the Society of American Archaeology’s Open Science Interest Group (OSIG) as a community to help archaeologists engage in and benefit from open science practices, and describe how it will facilitate the adoption of open science in archaeology.

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Past human population dynamics play a key role in integrated models of understanding socio-ecological change over time. However, little analysis on this issue has been carried out for the prehistoric societies in the Lower Danube and Eastern Balkans area. Here, we use summed probability distributions of radiocarbon dates to investigate potential regional and local variation population dynamics. Our study adopts a formal model-testing approach to the fifth millennium BC archaeological radiocarbon record, performing a region-wide, comparative analysis of the demographic trajectories of the area along lower Danube River. We follow the current framework of theoretical models of population growth and perform global and regional significance and spatial permutation tests on the data. Specifically, we investigate whether populations on both sides of the Danube follow a logistic pattern of steady growth, followed by a major decline over time. Finally, our analysis of local-scale growth investigates whether considerable heterogeneity or homogeneity within the region may be observed over the time span considered here. The results show both similarities and differences in the population trends across the area. Our findings are showcased in relation to the cultural characteristics of the region’s 5th millennium BC societies, and future research directions are also suggested.