CFP.txt

SAA’s information about the 2019 meeting, including instructions and policies for submissions: http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/Call%20for%20Submissions%202019.pdf 

Symposium: Practical approaches to identifying evolutionary processes in the archaeological record 

Organisers: Ben Marwick & Enrico Crema

The goal of this session to discuss the practical application of computational methods for identifying drift, selection, innovation, transmission bias, extinction, and many other evolutionary processes in the archaeological record. In recent years there have been many exciting methodological advances in applying Darwinian evolutionary concepts to answer fundamental questions about human behaviour, demography, and material culture. These innovations are applicable to a wide variety of artefact types, such as ceramics, lithics, and others. However, much of this cutting-edge work remains esoteric because of the technical complexity of extending these new approaches beyond their initial publication. This has limited the scope of potential reuse of these methods, and their potential (and limitations) has yet to be fully explored. The priority for this session is to show how these methods are broadly accessible to any archaeologist who is curious about evolutionary methods in archaeology. Papers in this session will go ‘behind the scenes’ of these analyses to show the practical details of how the analyses are done, and how the results can be interpreted. Papers will be accompanied by online compendia provided as a resource for further ‘hands-on’ study after the session. 

Session-specific instructions to participants:

The goal of this session is to get people using methods of identifying evolutionary processes. This means showing screenshots of how your raw data look (e.g. the layout in Excel), and screenshots of how you do calculations (e.g. R code, Beast, MrBayes, etc. or whatever is doing the heavy lifting). Ideally your presentation will walk-through the key steps of an analysis you have already published, or one that is in preparation for publication. 

We strongly encourage you to prepare a short R Markdown document to accompany your presentation. We are especially keen for presentations to run code directly before the audience to show the steps, but we realise this may not be possible or desirable for in every case. Ideally this will be self-contained and reproducible with R or Python code (R Markdown can include Python code) and narrative text to give some context to what the code is doing. It should not be a full scholarly treatment, like a journal article, but rather more like short notes on how to do this analysis, similar to an R package vignette. If your analysis is very computationally intensive, please mention this clearly, and include a version that can run in a very short time, with a clear note that this is just for demonstration purposes. We will collect these and assemble them into a bookdown book that will be freely available online after the session.