Session: #603

Regular session

The application of quantitative methods in archaeology has grown exponentially over the past decades. This tendency towards quantification is mainly driven by the need to build more robust interpretations about the past, limiting the subjective factors of qualitative analyses. Quantification has gone hand in hand with the development and spread of digital tools, whose generalization has facilitated the replicability and reproducibility of archaeological studies. Besides, the application of quantitative and computational methods has allowed to address broader and more complex research questions and to handle far larger datasets.
Even though over the past years there has been an increased emphasis on transparency and reproducibility in archaeological sciences, such efforts have often ended up in making available datasets with either raw data or extended information about the processed data, using either open repositories or papers’ supplementary information. However, critical issues such as replicability and transferability of research methods are often left in the background. As a result, there has also been a proliferation of custom methodological protocols designed for and applied to a specific case-study. We argue that this “methodological atomization” hinders our ability to compare results on a broader scale. Are we making the most effective use of the promising potentials of these digital and quantitative tools?
This session seeks to bring together scholars from different disciplines (from paleoanthropology or lithics to ceramology or architecture) working on different periods (prehistoric and historic archaeology) who use well-defined workflows for data collection, analysis, and visualization. These practices should not only be conceived to allow research reproducibility, but also replicability, reuse of data and methods, and facilitation of methodological transfer across disciplines. We encourage presentations about specific case studies from different disciplines and periods, and dealing with questions at different scales, as well as formal strategies from research groups, projects, or institutions.

Quantitative archaeology, Replicability, Open methods, Open data

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3D-archaeology; PaM

Diego Lombao (Spain) ^1,2

José Ramón Rabuñal (Denmark) ^3,4
Armando Falcucci (Germany) ⁵
Jean-Baptiste Lebret (France) ⁶
Leticia Tobalina-Pulido (Spain) ⁷