Aggregates, Formational Emergence, and the Focus on Practice in Stone Artifact Archaeology

The stone artifact record has been one of the major grounds for investigating our evolution. With the predominant focus on their morphological attributes and technological aspects of manufacture, stone artifacts and their assemblages have been analyzed as explicit measures of past behaviors, adaptations, and population histories. This analytical focus on technological and morphological appearance is one of the characteristics of the conventional approach for constructing inferences from this record. An equally persistent routine involves ascribing the emerged patterns and variability within the archaeological deposits directly to long-term central tendencies in human actions and cultural transmission. Here we re-evaluate this conventional approach. By invoking some of the known concerns and concepts about the formation of archaeological record, we introduce notions of aggregates and formational emergence to expand on the understanding of how artifacts accumulate, what these accumulations represent, and how the patterns and variability among them emerge. To infer behavior that could inform on past lifeways, we further promote a shift in the focus of analysis from the technological and morphological appearance of artifacts and assemblages to the practice of stone use. We argue for a more rigorous and multi-level inferential procedure in modeling behavioral adaptation and evolution.

How to Use Replication Assignments for Teaching Integrity in Empirical Archaeology

ABSTRACTThe 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.