Open methods in archaeology: how to encourage reproducible research as the default practice

Scientific progress famously depends on the evaluation of findings through replication. Likewise, while social sciences and humanities subjects may not always espouse this exact vision of how we build knowledge, many researchers in these fields would argue that they too can benefit from greater discursive transparency. However, as archaeology and other research areas have become more complex, especially with the use of computationally intensive methods, it has become increasingly difficult to reproduce findings and efficiently build on past research. While exact replication of results is sometimes not feasible because of limitations of time and resources, minimal standards of reproducibility are emerging as a norm of practice in contemporary computational and biological sciences. These include opening methods up for inspection by sharing and recognising code and data as a citable research objects, and in some cases including them directly and at an early stage in the peer review process. However, there remain some significant and continuing impediments to enabling such transparency in archaeology. In this session, we therefore wish to discuss our prevailing norms in archaeology, showcase some current best practice in terms of open methods, and advocate future directions for improving the reproducibility of archaeological research.