Improving archaeological metadata reporting in human paleogenomic studies

While dramatically increasing our understanding of past demographic and adaptive processes, paleogeneomic research has also been criticized for a perceived disconnect between geneticists and other parties involved in the study of the past. For interdisciplinary research to be productive, contextual metadata associated with paleogenomic samples should be accessible in the same publication. Here, we examined the extent of archaeological metadata reporting in 30 peer-reviewed ancient DNA studies, based on genetic sequences from 3911 ancient humans, published between 2013 and 2024. Our findings show that the reporting of archaeological data is inconsistent across studies, and we have sought to identify the driving factors. Overall, we found no strong explanatory variables, though some metadata fields - like Geolocation - have improved in completeness over time. These inconsistencies mean that metadata reporting is often insufficient to directly investigate the relationship between patterns of cultural and genetic change on the basis of published data alone. We propose a minimum information checklist as a best-practice guideline for collecting and reporting archaeological data in the future.