How to Use Replication Assignments for Teaching Integrity in Empirical Archaeology

Abstract

The value of new archaeological knowledge is strongly determined by how credible it is, and a key measure of scientific credibility is how replicable new results are. However, few archaeologists learn the skills necessary to conduct replication as part of their training. This means there is a gap between the ideals of archaeological science and the skills we teach future researchers. Here we argue for replications as a core type of class assignment in archaeology courses to close this gap and establish a culture of replication and reproducibility. We review replication assignments in other fields and describe how to implement a replication assignment suitable for many types of archaeology programs. We describe our experience with replication in an upper-level undergraduate class on stone artifact analysis. Replication assignments can help archaeology programs give students the skills that enable transparent and reproducible research.

Reproducibility, Replicability, and Revisiting the Insta-Dead and the Human Remains Trade

“…This brief report revisited the work we conducted four years ago to see if the broad patterns in terms of amounts being sold, and structure of the network, held up or if they had changed. It is possible to replicate the general thrust of what we tried to do in our 2017 article, but we cannot exactly reproduce what we did (understanding the difference between reproduction and replication as proposed by Marwick 2017, Marwick et al 2020.…”

“…In principle, this should be possible. Marwick et al (2020) note that there is much confusion around the ideas of 'replicability' and 'reproducibility', depending on the field, with some disciplines regarding them as synonyms, and other disciplines holding their meaning is opposed. We follow the distinction made by Marwick and collaborators: being able to reproduce a piece of research involves being able to arrive at the same results using the same data and the same code (Marwick 2017).…”

“…That is, there is enough information communicated that someone else might be able to see for themselves if the conclusions are warranted given the methodology. Replication, by contrast, is the ability to get to those same conclusions using new data and new analyses (Marwick et al 2020).…”

Agent-Based Modeling, Scientific Reproducibility, and Taphonomy: A Successful Model Implementation Case Study

“…Coding and reconstructing another's work is dependent on the degree of available open access data and can create significant time demands (Marwick 2017). Nevertheless, as computational reproducibility, training in reproducible research, and an ethos of sharing data across the social sciences continue to gain traction, perhaps model replication will become a more frequent practice (Marwick 2017;Marwick et al 2019;Nosek et al 2015). Such practices may continue to become commonplace as archaeologists work together to discuss the utility of ABM's in jargon-free language and create tutorials to increase accessibility (Crabtree et al 2019;Davies et al 2019;Romanowska et al 2019).…”

Reproducibility efforts as a teaching tool: A pilot study

“…Similar efforts have been reported previously by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, the University of Washington, and others. These efforts focused on the field of Psychology [ 12 , 13 ] and Archeology [ 14 ]. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to employ the analytical replication as a teaching tool in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics.…”