IntroductionIn this paper we investigate recent developments which are facilitating computational archaeology's return to fundamental principles of the scientific method. We ask whether this might be the beginning of a broader change in the field. Revolutions or paradigm-shifts in archaeology have been proposed to occur following major theoretical statements (Clark 1993;Härke 2002), but there is an argument among philosophers of science whether revolutions in science are idea-driven or tool-driven (Dyson 2000;Galison 1997). This argument motivated us to explore how the disciplines of ecology and archaeology have started to embrace tools that improve the reproducibility of research. We focus on one set of tools for this change, based on writing data analysis scripts in free and open source programming languages, exemplified by R, and the practice of sharing of these scripts. We focus on R because our prior observations indicate it is by far the most common scripting language used by ecologists and archaeologists. Bibliometric evidence shows a strong increase in the use of R among ecologists and the beginning of a similar development in archaeology. We evaluate how approaches to improving reproducibility and transparency in archaeology are mediated and transformed by digital approaches and propose these might reflect a tool-driven change in archaeology. Acknowledging that this is not a simple process, we offer an R-based tool to ease the task of creating a compen-dium which enables other researchers to reproduce the published results.