Modelling the Innovation and Extinction of Archaeological Ideas

Summary

The history of archaeology is often told as a sequence of prominent individuals and their publications. Due to the focus on big names and big papers, the diversity of archaeological publications is often underestimated. Here we introduce a quantitative method that illuminates historical trends in archaeological writing by investigating a large number of journal articles. We use a Bayesian framework developed for estimating speciation, extinction, and preservation rates from incomplete fossil data. We model archaeological ideas within this framework by equating citations of archaeological literature to occurrences in the fossil record. We obtained reference lists for 12,000 journal articles published between 1977 and 2017 and explored the chronological distribution of cited papers to identify periods of innovation and extinction. We discuss how our modeling approach helps to quantify the diversification of archaeological publications and our broader understanding about the history of archaeological thought.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21549