IOSA.it Open Archaeology

We're very pleased to announce that the new release of Total Open Station is almost ready. Within a few days we're going to release the 0.2 version of the application.

It will be available for windows, linux and (a little later) apple systems.

There will be a windows exe, already available and packaged.

It has been quite interesting packaging it.
We have used pyInstaller ( http://www.pyinstaller.org/ ) .

When the cmd is open ( on a win sys ofcourse ) and we've reached pyinstaller folder, the comands we've typed are just:

python Makespec.py --tk --noconsole --icon="..\tops.ico" ..\totalopenstation\scripts\totalopenstation-gui.py

python Build.py totalopenstation-gui\totalopenstation-gui.spec

Cool stuff pyinstaller: easy and working!

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.

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).

Ten days ago Luca Mandolesi released his pyArchInit QGIS plugin.
pyArchInit is a free/open source tool for the management of excavation data (compatible with Italian ICCD standard record sheets), that integrates itself inside the QGIS environment and gives you a highly portable system designed by an archaeologist for his daily work in rescue excavations.
pyArchInit was presented at the last workshop on archaeology and free/open source software in Rome, you can see Luca's presentation here.

Titus Brown is looking for examples of how Python is used in the Humanities. Archaeologists love snakes!
I have pointed out our experience with Python programming, which we also presented on April, 27th in Rome, but you can submit more examples, as I'm sure there are dozens of them, particularly in the field of database management.

After 8 months of silence about this interesting topic, at last I've found some time to put online the small draft application I have been writing to demonstrate how to automate the use of Graphviz to generate Harris matrix diagrams for your excavation (or anything else you can study by stratigraphy). The code can be retrieved at http://bitbucket.org/steko/harris/ and there you'll be able to get also future updates.

The application is far from complete and has no GUI yet, but at least it shows the model I have developed from the first examples, where all steps were to be performed “by hand”.

From the theory of E. C. Harris, we all know that all stratigraphic relations are bound to what I called an ABC model:

• A fter
• B efore
• C ontemporary