Final project: Draft

The purpose of this assignment is to help you to narrow down the topic of your final project. It is a piece of scaffolding to support you to do an excellent job in the final project. 

Please note that this final project is optional. If you want a 4.0 for this class, you need to submit a final project. If you will be satisfied with a lower grade, you do not need to do this final project. 

In your group of 2-4 people (FAQ: how to work well in a group) you need to discuss some archaeological questions that you are interested to answer with your dataset. To get some inspiration about suitable questions you can ask, take a look at the questions we have been asking in our weekly lab reports.

Here's some guidance on drafting good archaeological questions:

• State a specific about a time period in the past, and a geographical location. You should study the narrative accompanying the data set you chose to get this information about the time and region that your question should mention. 
• State one of these themes in your question:
  • emergence: of new forms of subsistence, technology, social systems
  • complexity: especially changes in social, economic, and political complexity
  • demography: numbers of people increasing or decreasing in the past
  • mobility: people moving into or out of certain areas, human groups interacting by moving around and mixing
  • identity: symbols, art, indicating cultural group areas, boundaries, changes in these in the past
  • resilience: the capacity of a human group to recover quickly from a difficult situation, like an environment event
  • human–environment interactions: especially how human behaviour and relationships changed after past climate changes, or across different geographic regions
• Your research question for this project should:
  • be a statement that ends with a question mark
  • be interesting and relevant to you personally
  • be answerable using the data set you have chosen to work on (keep it very modest and simple)
  • be about human behaviour and relationships in the past
  • Avoid vague concepts that are difficult to access through the archaeological record. For example, questions about the feelings that ancient people had, and the meanings their artefacts of are sometimes hard to answer using the data you have available. Instead, focus on more concrete concepts about past human behaviours and relationships, things that leave material traces that are easier to intepret
  • not require a lifetime of work to answer! A modest, achievable goal is perfectly fine here. The purpose of this project is to practice the research process, not to revolutionize archaeology with an incredible discovery (we can do that next quarter ;)

We'd love to guide you on coming up with great questions, so please feel free to post on Discord once you have a few ideas, and we will help you refine them. We can use that to discuss your research questions before you submit. 

For this assignment you need to draft a Quarto document that imports your dataset, and produces at least one relevant exploratory data visualisation. You do not need to have answered your question yet, but you do need to show that you have made a start working on it. We will follow up with you to guide you on how to get a good answer to the questions you have posed (or how to change the questions to suit the data you have chosen!)

You need to submit here:

• An qmd file that
  • lists all the names of your group members in the 'author:' field
  • includes all the other YAML lines that we have learned about in class. 
• The data file that you are working on (in whatever format it comes in, Excel or CSV is fine)
• Brief narrative text in your qmd that includes
  • 1-2 complete and detailed sentences that describe:
  • 1-2 potential research questions that you will answer in your data analysis.
  • A citation to your data source in one of those sentence,  in the same way as we have been doing in the lab reports.
• A code block in your qmd that
  • imports and cleans the data, using the functions and conventions that we have practiced in previous lab reports.
  • If you would like to use some code that we have not previously used in class, please check in with me before you submit so I can confirm it will be a good choice.
• A code block in your qmd that
  • produces one relevant exploratory data visualisation for each group member.
  • each figure must have a caption that includes the name of the person who contributed it.
  • each figure must use the ggplot2 package to create your visualisation, using the skills and types of visualisations that we have practiced in class (histograms are a great option here!).
  • If you would like to try something we have not done in class, please check in with me before you submit so I can confirm it will be a good choice.
• We should be able to render your document when we grade it, so please double-check that all members of your group can render before submitting

Please also submit the HTML output from your qmd file, and the data file(s) so we can render your qmd file on our computer. 

Each member of your group needs to make their own submission to this assignment, and you should all present the same questions and the same set of visualisations. 

If you would like to include in your draft R code that is different from what we have used in class (e.g. R functions that we have never used in any lab report), you must check with me first, before you submit. I am confident that most students will be able fully complete this final project using only the functions we have learned in the weekly lab reports. For some projects other functions will be very helpful, let me guide you on that. If your lab report is substantially R functions that we have not used in class, and you have not discussed it with me before submitting here, I may report you for academic misconduct under the Student Conduct Code Links to an external site..