Ben Marwick

Ancient artifacts hint at earliest protowriting Geometric shapes on 40,000-year-old bone and ivory suggest early European Homo sapiens long possessed cognitive tools for language

Around 40,000 years ago, migrating Homo sapiens spread across Europe carrying handled objects intricately etched with geometric designs.

Today, researchers find these signs might have represented an ancient form of proto-writing.

#Archaeology #Aurignacian

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New in @science.org

“Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing”

📚 Congratulations to Dr Jess Beck, Ad Astra Fellow, UCD School of Archaeology, and multi-national co-authors on their important new paper in Current Anthropology critically assessing archaeological publishing.

doi.org/10.1086/739789

“Rather than treating [academic] job ads as prescriptions, we frame them as signals — shaped by departmental needs, institutional pressures, and broader social moments. This gives a clearer picture of the demand side of academic archaeology”

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Lab morale got you down? Try a handbook Documents that lay out a research group’s ethos and practical guidelines are becoming increasingly popular in the academic community.

Documents that lay out a research group’s ethos and practical guidelines are becoming increasingly popular in the academic community

go.nature.com/3OzPt0h

Lab morale got you down? Try a handbook Documents that lay out a research group’s ethos and practical guidelines are becoming increasingly popular in the academic community.

Lab morale got you down? Try a handbook

Check out our new article in Current Anthropology on the changing landscape of archaeological publishing! www.doi.org/10.1086/739789

New article! "Changing the Landscape of Archaeological Publishing" in Current Anthropology, by a giant collaborative group of coauthors fearlessly led by Jess Beck and including @bridgetalex.bsky.social @benmarwick.bsky.social @christinawarinner.bsky.social www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

Cover of "American Antiquity" journal, featuring two individuals examining artifacts at an archaeological site, with text beside it reading "American Antiquity. Paper of the Month".

The Paper of the Month from American Antiquity is "Hire Ed: Job Market Dynamics for Tenure-Track Faculty Positions in Archaeology" by Ben Marwick et al., available #openaccess!

📚 https://cup.org/4bJJlw5

#Archaeology #PaperOfTheMonth

Figure 1 from the preprint: Comparison of Web of Science (Wos), OpenAlex (OA), and OpenCitations (OC) data for the articles present in the three datasets. A. Number of authors, B. Length of the title, C. Number of pages, D. Attributed year, E. Number of references. For each plot, a dashed-line represents y = x.

Figure 5 of the preprint: Biplot of the first and second principal components of a PCA computed on the means of the five bibliometric variables for each journal in the sample. The arrows represent the correlation between each original variable and the principal components. The direction and length of the arrows indicate how strongly each variable contributes to each component.

Figure 6 of the preprint: Variation in bibliometric indicators of hardness for 25 archaeological journals based on OpenAlex data. The journals are ordered for each indicator so that within each plot, the harder journals are at the top of the plot and the softer journals are at the base. Panel F shows a bar plot that is the single consensus ranking computed from all five variables, using the Borda Count ranking algorithm.

New version of my reproduction and replication attempt of @benmarwick.bsky.social 's paper published few months ago in JAS, but here with #OpenAlex and #OpenCitations data.
You can read it in a interactive html page here: aqueff.github.io/replication_...
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Technological innovations and hafted technology in central China ~160,000–72,000 years ago - Nature Communications Stone tools illustrate behavioural complexities in Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Here, the authors present small dimensional flakes and hafted tools from Xigou, central China, dated to ~160–72 thousand years ago that demonstrate early, complex technological advancements.

Early humans in central China may have been making sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago, according to research in Nature Communications. This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period. 🏺 🧪

Super interesting article on the archaeology jobs wiki and trends in archaeology job ads

Congratulations to UCD School of Archaeology’s Dr Jess Beck and her colleagues on their paper in American Antiquity, just published December 2025

“Hire Ed: Job Market Dynamics for Tenure-Track Faculty Positions in Archaeology”

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very excited that our new guidelines for reporting the results of statistical analyses in the Journal of Archaeological Science have now been published online: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/jour...
🦴📊 @ercrema.bsky.social @benmarwick.bsky.social

Patterns we noticed:

- environmental & public archaeology dominate;
- Indigenous & historical archaeology spike ~2019–21;
- digital methods rise;
- hyper-specialized artifact methods barely appear.

More details: doi.org/10.1017/aaq....

First page of journal article with title, authors, and abstract

We looked at 10 years of archaeology tenure-track job ads (2013–2023) to see what departments actually ask for: topics, methods, regions, and application materials.

Open-access paper: doi.org/10.1017/aaq.... Data and R code used for the study are openly available here doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 🧪

Between Nomads and Settlers: A Quantitative Analysis of Lithic Assemblages from Tula’i (Tuleii), Zagros, Iran This study examines the lithic assemblages from Tula’i to investigate the occupation styles and mobility strategies of the inhabitants during the Neolithic. We analyzed the lithic production patter...

#考古学のおやつ 2/2
▶ Setareh Shafizadeh 𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑙. (2025) Between Nomads and Settlers: A Quantitative Analysis of Lithic Assemblages from Tula’i (Tuleii), Zagros, Iran. 𝐿𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑐 𝑇𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑛𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑦. doi.org/10.1080/0197...

Open access:Between Nomads and Settlers: A Quantitative Analysis of Lithic Assemblages from Tula’i (Tuleii), Zagros, Iran. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Using the lead isotope community and neighbouring fields as nucleus, this workshop initiates the development of a toolbox for the archaeological sciences written as R package.
bit.ly/4nah57V @benmarwick.bsky.social

Why do societies reliably develop strikingly similar traditions like dance songs, hero stories, shamanism & justice institutions?

In a new BBS target article, I propose a theory for such "super-attractors" + cultural evolution more broadly. Now open for commentary: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Co-organizing a session at #SAA San Francisco with T. Kovach: "Toward an Integration of Quantitative Approaches in #Lithic Analysis." A few spots still open! Abstracts due Sept. 4.

Email me if you’d like to join the conversation: armando.falcucci@nyu.edu

#Archaeology #FlintFriday #FossilFriday 🏺

Here's said mascot along with an excellent checklist by @shreyadimri.bsky.social

🎉New preprint!

"TADA! Simple guidelines to improve code sharing"

tinyurl.com/8rmnwjrk

We present simple guidelines to help researchers of all coding levels improve the transparency and reproducibility of their analytical code, TADA!

Transferable, Accessible, Documented, Annotated.

All data and code available on zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zeno...) and on my GitHub account. #opendata
Thanks @benmarwick.bsky.social ‬for the possibility to learn from reproducing your work and for providing the basis for this replication, which are unfortunately excessively rare in #Archaeology!

Boxplots comparing data for top-25 journal metrics and data from Fanelli & Glanzel 2013 for Physics, Social Sciences and Humanities. Most of the time Archaeology fits pretty close to Social Sciences, except for Diversity of sources where it harder than Physics.

New #preprint online: Reproduction and replication of @benmarwick.bsky.social (2025), with data from OpenAlex.

Accessible as interactive html version: aqueff.github.io/replication_...

and more traditional manuscript with doi here: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

Is archaeology a hard or soft science? 🏺🧪

Yes, you can see some of the most recent debate on this question in the comments where I shared the paper here: www.reddit.com/r/Archaeolog...

Checklist of items researchers can do to improve the reproducibility of their code

Here is my checklist summarising a small set of some of the simplest tasks you can do that have high potential to improve the reproducibility of your analysis code.

This is based on my year of reproducibility reviews for the J. of Archaeological Science:

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lHjN_6yUM... 🧪🏺

Statistical modelling in archaeology: some recent trends and future perspectives This paper reviews the application of statistical models in archaeology in the last decade, focusing in particular on multilevel models, statistical t…

I'm happy to share this review article, where I attempt to ponder about missed opportunities in archaeological statistical modelling.

First page of the journal article

Fig 1 boxplot

Fig 2 scatter plot panel

Fig 3 ridgeplot panel

Is archaeology a science? 🧪

Here's my new paper that has a go at answering this question by analysing 10,000 journal articles:

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lHjN_6yUM...

🚨 Big milestone for Rdatasets 🚨

The web archive now hosts 3400+ free and documented CSV datasets. Fantastic for teaching and testing!

And {Rdatasets} is a new #RStats 📦 for easy download and search

Web archive: vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets

R 📦: vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasetspkg

It's CES election time! We have FOUR positions that have come up for renewal, so please consider nominating yourself or your colleagues. Nominations close June 20th, with voting from June 30th -July 4th.