Digitally Teaching Digital Skills: Lessons Drawn from a Small Private Online Course (SPOC) on ‘Modelling and Simulation in Archaeology’ at Leiden University

With the proliferation of online learning, the future of classroom teaching has been called into question. However, the unfaltering popularity of brick-and-mortar courses indicates that direct access to expert knowledge and face-to-face engagements remain key considerations for students. Here we showcase a combination of these two worlds in a Small Private Online Course (SPOC). Compared to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), SPOCs are developed for smaller and more dedicated target groups and depend on close engagement between teachers and students. This format enables educational providers to involve internal and external students and teachers alike and to make ample use of online resources. This paper is based upon our experiences of running a SPOC on ‘Modelling and Simulation in Archaeology’ at Leiden University. We review the process of developing and running the course aimed at teaching archaeology students computer programming skills, while supporting their development as professional archaeologists and responsible academics

fiReproxies: A computational model providing insight into heat-affected archaeological lithic assemblages

<div><p>Evidence for fire use becomes increasingly sparse the further back in time one looks. This is especially true for Palaeolithic assemblages. Primary evidence of fire use in the form of hearth features tends to give way to clusters or sparse scatters of more durable heated stone fragments. In the absence of intact fireplaces, these thermally altered lithic remains have been used as a proxy for discerning relative degrees of fire use between archaeological layers and deposits. While previous experimental studies have demonstrated the physical effects of heat on stony artefacts, the mechanisms influencing the proportion of fire proxy evidence within archaeological layers remain understudied. This fundamental study is the first to apply a computer-based model (fiReproxies) in an attempt to simulate and quantify the complex interplay of factors that ultimately determine when and in what proportions lithic artefacts are heated by (anthropogenic) fires. As an illustrative example, we apply our model to two hypothetical archaeological layers that reflect glacial and interglacial conditions during the late Middle Palaeolithic within a generic simulated cave site to demonstrate how different environmental, behavioural and depositional factors like site surface area, sedimentation rate, occupation frequency, and fire size and intensity can, independently or together, significantly influence the visibility of archaeological fire signals.</p></div

Flow diagram outlining the basic structure of the ‘fiReproxies’ computer simulation employed in this study.

<p>Flow diagram outlining the basic structure of the ‘fiReproxies’ computer simulation employed in this study.</p

Rose plots providing visual representations of the Layer 1 and Layer 2 occupation scenarios described in section 4.2.

<p>The red arrows and associated red numbers indicate the resultant percentages of heated lithics produced in each scenario, while the values of other parameters are depicted as blue arrows. Note the different scales for heated lithics between Layer 1 and Layer 2. FNP = Fire near previous, FR = Fires random, LSNF = Lithic scatters near fire.</p

Taphonomy matters

Pearce et al. suggest that “… light woodland and open vegetation represented, on average, more than 50% cover” during the temperate phase of the Last Interglacial period in the whole of Europe. We identify some issues with the way they reach this conclusion and propose an explanation of why a regional dominance of open vegetation is suggested by their modelling work: insufficient attention to various taphonomic processes that influenced the palaeontological assemblages recorded from the sites investigated as well as their larger geographical patterning

Chart comparing same-sized occupation surfaces of different shapes (i.e. degree of elongation) and different hearth and lithic placement scenarios.

<p>Parameters: 1 fire, fire size 1, 4 lithic scatters, 30 occupations, 0–100% TB, 1% introduced lithics. FNP = Fire near previous, FR = Fires random, LSNF = Lithic scatters near fire, LSR = Lithics scatters random, TB = Thermal buffering.</p

Charts demonstrating how the number of occupations per layer impacts heated lithic percentages for Layer 1 and Layer 2.

<p>Parameters: Fires Random/Lithic Scatters Random (FR/LSR), 1 fire, fire size 1. 4 lithic scatters, 0% and 5% TB, 1% introduced lithics.</p

Charts comparing fire and lithic scatter placement scenarios between Layer 1 and Layer 2.

<p>Parameters: 1 fire, fire size 1, 4 lithic scatters, 30 occupations, 0–100% TB, 1% introduced lithics. The heated lithic percentages and curves for the FR/LR and FR/LU settings are virtually identical to those seen in the FR/LSNF and FR/SLR charts, while the plots using the FNP/LR and FNP/LU settings are nearly identical to those seen in the FNP/LSR chart, so these were not included here but were included in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0196777#pone.0196777.s001" target="_blank">S1 Fig</a> in the Supporting Information. FNP = Fire near previous, FR = Fires random, LSNF = Lithic scatters near fire, LSR = Lithic scatters random, LR = Lithics random, LU = Lithics uniform, TB = Thermal buffering.</p

Inbreeding, Allee effects and stochasticity might be sufficient to account for Neanderthal extinction

The replacement of Neanderthals by Anatomically Modern Humans has typically been attributed to environmental pressure or a superiority of modern humans with respect to competition for resources. Here we present two independent models that suggest that no such heatedly debated factors might be needed to account for the demise of Neanderthals. Starting from the observation that Neanderthal populations already were small before the arrival of modern humans, the models implement three factors that conservation biology identifies as critical for a small population’s persistence, namely inbreeding, Allee effects and stochasticity. Our results indicate that the disappearance of Neanderthals might have resided in the smallness of their population(s) alone: even if they had been identical to modern humans in their cognitive, social and cultural traits, and even in the absence of inter-specific competition, Neanderthals faced a considerable risk of extinction. Furthermore, we suggest that if modern humans contributed to the demise of Neanderthals, that contribution might have had nothing to do with resource competition, but rather with how the incoming populations geographically restructured the resident populations, in a way that reinforced Allee effects, and the effects of inbreeding and stochasticity