IOSA.it Open Archaeology

The last special issue of the Radiocarbon journal marked a big step forward in radiocarbon dating. The IntCal04 calibration curve was available for a period that goes back to 26000 years BP, while the new IntCal09 data extends calibration back in time until 50000 years BP, pretty much covering the entire time span that can be obtained by means of ¹⁴C. Radiocarbon scientists believe the availability of this new calibration curve, together with some adjustments and updates for already covered periods, will allow a lot of archaeological sites to get better absolute dates, including those from the age of transition between Neanderthals and modern humans in Europe and the Mediterranean. The IntCal working group will continue to enhance the available data and a new issue is already planned for 2011.

A few days ago, thanks to Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a proposal for a Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology was drafted. There's a wiki page for coordinating and collecting ideas — which acts also as a brief call for participation until a true one is sent. The idea came out after I discovered (and liked it a lot) the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN ... a name familiar to anyone using Perl or R), an OKF project defined as “Debian of data”.

A few months ago, we found out through Antiquist that DAI (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, i.e. the German Archaeological Institute) has published a set of IT Guidelines for all its research projects. Even though it's primarily intended for a German audience (German-speaking too, obviously) it is a very interesting piece of standards. You can get it from the DAI website in PDF. With some help from tools like Google Translate, one can even get an idea of what these guidelines say also without being a native speaker. We did, and here is a partial summary of the document.

Samian Pottery data are available in various formats, namely XLS, SXC (OpenOffice.org 1.0 format) and TXT (tab-separated values in fact). There is no actual difference between the content and the structure of files among the different formats, just the spreadsheet files have lots of contexts in just 3 files (each context is a single sheet), while the tab-separated values files are one per context. That said, and provided that I already planned to extract data using the Python standard library programming modules, I thought the text files would be the best choice to start.

A few days ago I've started my first Python 3 program. It's written from scratch using modules from Python's standard library. I'm using the Debian package from experimental, which works fine.
The program is meant to extract meaningful data about Samian Pottery in Britain from a dataset available at ADS, published by Steven Willis. I discovered this dataset some months ago through an ABZU entry that pointed to the ADS page (you have to agree to the site's use conditions before you can access the page).

The Aardvarchaeology blog run by Martin Rundkvist has an interesting and detailed article about one current major problem of dendrochronology, which he summarises as:

I am in the process of writing/building my dissertation, and dealing with pottery distribution maps and such things, I've just noticed that I miss something important: a ”background” map. Using 21st maps isn't that good, mostly because coastline went under major changes between Roman times and today.