Our new paper reports a complete Quina technological system in the 60-50 ka assemblage at Longtan, Southwest China

Here is our plain English summary: https://theconversation.com/stone-tool-discovery-in-china-shows-people-in-east-asia-were-innovating-during-the-middle-paleolithic-like-in-europe-and-middle-east-252868

Here is the paper: Ruan, Q. et al. (2025) Quina lithic technology indicates diverse Late Pleistocene human dynamics in East Asia https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2418029122

PDF with no paywall: https://faculty.washington.edu/bmarwick/PDFs/Ruan-et-al-2025.pdf

Data and code: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/MZN9B

@jemsu thanks so much, very interesting to see that!

@jemsu I am a repro editor for a journal in my field, I'd love to see the checklist that you mention, could you share a link to it?

@adamhsparks @aap_saaorg @edelponte thanks, yes I recall you mentioned that in the past, was it like an opt-in service for authors?

We are extraordinarily lucky to have Ben guiding us to better and best practices, and now taking the role of Associate Editor of Reproducibility! 🙏 Ben!
Reposting from @benmarwick
Introducing the Associate Editor of Reproducibility for Advances in Archaeological Practice @aap_saaorg https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-archaeological-practice/article/introducing-the-associate-editor-of-reproducibility/DBFACBCD750189B1CB4C8332FB6FFE34
This initiative contributes to making archaeology more transparent & accessible & a source of trustworthy & reliable information about the human past.

Introducing the Associate Editor of Reproducibility for Advances in Archaeological Practice https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2024.15 @aap_saaorg

This initiative contributes to making archaeology more transparent and accessible and a source of trustworthy and reliable information about the human past.

Code and data are online here: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10693325

As far as we know, such a comprehensive analysis conducted within a single Bayesian framework has never before been attempted, and marks a significant methodological milestone for the study of cultural evolution.

Given this innovative approach, we placed considerable emphasis on systematically exploring the impact of both data and models on the results. This is achieved by incrementally introducing complexity, thereby laying a robust foundation for future research in this direction.

We also used skyline analysis to examine birth, death, diversification, and turnover rates across the four major climatic warming and cooling events during this timeframe, based on the Greenland ice-core event stratigraphy.

We used a fossilized birth-death sampling process model to infer time-scaled Bayesian phylogenies, utilizing the projectile point outline shape as continuous characters (first use of this in archaeology that we are aware of).

New paper! Led by David Matzig, we used a state-of-the-art Bayesian phylodynamic framework to explore the evolution of projectile point shapes during the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic (approximately 15-11ka BP).

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240321

#webR v0.4.0 has just been released! The #wasm build of #Rstats has been updated to v4.4.1, some backend updates and fixes have been made, and some new user facing goodies have been added, including a simple data viewer (View()) and a HTML widget viewer, meaning packages that output interactive HTML (e.g. {gt}, {plotly} etc.) now work out of the box in the webR application. I also recently updated the publicly available Wasm builds of CRAN packages. Do give it a go at https://webr.r-wasm.org/v0.4.0/ 🎉

New paper, celebrating the work of Julie Stein!

DiCiro, A., Mitchell, N., & Marwick, B. (2024). Everything is a Deposit: An Interview with Pioneering Geoarchaeologist Julie K. Stein. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology, 34(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.5334/bha-697

v useful guide for teaching R
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012018

#Rprogramming

PSA: All #rstats package on #cran will get an official DOI!

This will facilitate bibliometrics and giving credit to :rstats: package authors.

Registering all 20,000+ packages will still take a few more days. But the first couple of thousand are already live. Example:

I did a little maintenance work on c14bazAAR today (https://github.com/ropensci/c14bazAAR). Among the databases it allows to download there is one called the "Radiocarbon Palaeolithic Europe Database" (https://ees.kuleuven.be/en/geography/projects/14c-palaeolithic). A little disclaimer on the website caught my attention 😢. Maybe there is somebody here working in the Palaeolithic and ready to take over this great resource. #archaeology #opendata #paleolithic #c14

@noxon great to hear that, I look forward to seeing the results! Do let me know if you need a hand with anything

@noxon looks good! Needs more ggplot2 😉

@RonaldVisser @rOpenSci @ldecicco congratulations, really great to see this!

Last days left to apply to a training school in computational archaeology in September in Brno!

Join us if you are interested in how to query and analyse archaeological data integrated in the ARIADNE research infrastructure using R.

https://aiscr.cz/atRium

#rstats #sparql #openscience #reproducibility #spatial #atrium