IOSA.it Open Archaeology

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.

Start reading here http://www.iris.ba.cnr.it/Corso.html “Corso di formazione "Low cost software & Cultural Heritage” (12 maggio - 9 giugno)” organized by an office of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR). I stumbled upon that from here.
Then, remind yourself that just two weeks ago we had our fourth workshop on “Free software, open source and open formats nei processi di ricerca archeologica”, organized by another CNR team in Rome.

The aficionados readers and users of iosa.it, if any, were probably asking themselves what was going on, given the substantial lack of updates here.
To make a long story short, I got my master degree cum laude in Late Antique Archaeology two weeks ago, on April, 21st (2762 a.U.c.). It took me several months of hard work, and obviously everything else, including this website and activity around it, hasn't been receiving lots of care. In a future post, I'll try to describe in detail my current situation and wishes concerning university, job and research.
My dissertation was entitled Defining complexity. The “circulation” of african red slip ware in Italy 400-700 AD. I've approached the subject by collecting a quite large dataset of published pottery from more than 100 archaeological sites in Northern and Central Italy. In the meanwhile, I've done my best to understand the most popular quantification methods (as usual, the good things about standards is that there are so many you can choose from) and their respective implications, even though in the end I've done very little work using quantification data, concentrating more on presence data (which have their bias problems, too). My analysis has been concentrated mainly on 3 directions:

Inoltro con grande piacere l'annuncio di Giancarlo:

Cari Amici,
scrivo solo per informarvi dell'uscita del volume "Spazio e Misura", pubblicato da Edizioni dell'Università, Siena. Si tratta di una guida di geografia quantitativaapplicata alle scienze umane.

Il testo è distribuito gratuitamente in versione PDF è può essere scaricato dal seguente indirizzo:

http://www.archeogr.unisi.it/spazioemisura/

Cari saluti,

Giancarlo Macchi

A quasi una settimana dalla conclusione del 4° workshop “Free software, open source e open formats nei processi di ricerca archeologica”, riesco finalmente a condividere qualche pensiero disorganico che ho raccolto nei due giorni di incontro, che sono stati veramente intensi. In questa non-sintesi mi soffermerò su alcuni aspetti in particolare, e non ho nessuna pretesa di riuscire a riassumere l'intero corso delle due giornate. Credo che la migliore sintesi possa risultare da una pluralità di interventi: segnalo per ora l'entusiasmo dell'amico Mario Trabucco.

Looks like IOSA is not the only group of passionate archaeologists who develop free/open source software to fulfil their research needs and release their source code for the community.
The LDPL (Laboratoire Départemental de Préhistoire du Lazaret) maintains open source software mostly developed internally, but their source code is released to the Open Source Community under the GPL 2 licence.
Archeobases is an archaeological database manager written in Python (another choice we share), it's developed mainly for the research project at Lazaret even though a new refactored version is due in the next future. You can find more details about Archeobases and the LDPL committment to free archaeological software at http://cambrien.unice.fr/opensource/wiki .

Il programma completo del "4° workshop italiano “Open source, free software e open formats nei processi di ricerca archeologica” è ora disponibile.
Ricordiamo che il workshop si svolgerà i giorni 27 e 28 aprile 2009, presso la sede centrale del CNR di Roma.
Il progetto IOSA sarà presente con due interventi e un laboratorio introduttivo sulla statistica in archeologia, basato sul Wiki di Archeologia Quantitativa.