IOSA.it Open Archaeology

The R environment is very powerful for analysis purposes. Despite the fact it has almost no graphical interface, its capabilities at producing high quality graphical output are probably even more than you will ever need.
Archaeologists willing to deal with quantitative methods for analyzing their data and drawing inferences from samples, will find that R is their best companion if they're going to take the time to learn some of the basics.
Let's start with some galleries that help us understanding what we can achieve with R:

VIPS is an image processing system designed with efficiency in mind. It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM in your machine), and for working with colour. It can perform many image manipulation tasks much faster than other packages such as ImageMagick and the GIMP and includes some special features such as creating single "mosaic" images from multiple parts. VIPS consists of two main components: an image processing library with some command-line tools and a spreadsheet-like graphical user interface, called nip2 With nip2, rather than directly editing images, you build relationships between objects in a spreadsheet-like fashion. When you make a change somewhere, nip2 recalculates the objects affected by that change. Since it is demand-driven this update is very fast, even for very, very large images. nip2 is very good at creating pipelines of image manipulation operations. It is not very good for image editing tasks like touching up photographs.

This work aims to develop an educational digital photogrammetric workstation, using a high-level programming language.
The concept of an educational digital photogrammetric workstation deals with two main pillars: the freedom of its many components and the self-teaching approach, allowing its use with no cost by any person who is interested to do it. A rich tutorial on digital photogrammetry allows anyone to get into every part of the program.
It is in development however current version is quite stable and can be used.

SIOX stands for Simple Interactive Object Extraction and is a solution for extracting foreground from still images with little user interaction. The underlying method is fast, noise robust, and can also be used for segmentation of videos.
SIOX is free (GNU GPL) and is currently being integrated into the GIMP and is currently available in the development version. If you want to try it out, get the latest CVS version.
SIOX originates from E-Chalk where an instructor standing in front of an electronic chalkboard is segmentated.

ImageJ is a public domain Java image processing program inspired by NIH Image for the Macintosh. It runs, either as an online applet or as a downloadable application, on any computer with a Java 1.1 or later virtual machine. Downloadable distributions are available for Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X and Linux.
It is used in the Dendrochronology Lab at I.S.Cu.M. (Istituto per la Storia della Cultura Materiale) here in Genoa.

Panorama Tools is a free program which can be used to
generate, edit and transform many kinds of panoramic images.
Its main functionalities are...

The 6th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage

Following the discussions of previous VAST Symposia and Eurographics Symposia on Graphics and Cultural Heritage, the 2005 VAST Symposium will focus on the interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research interests including those of monuments, sites and museums as manifest in the EPOCH Network, covering every phase of the cultural heritage informatics, from initial data capture to information processing, and the dissemination of results to the scientific community and the general public.