IOSA.it Open Archaeology

These pages on the website of prof. Juan A. Barceló deal in detail with some of the hot topics in archaeological computing, like

• Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks used to analyze archaeological datasets
• Statistical methods
• Spatial Analysis techniques to be performed within GIS
• and more

Content is available both in Catalá and English and can be useful to give students a complete and exhaustive overview of some of the most advanced techniques that can be used to improve and speed up archeological research.

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:

surfit is a computer program which enables to calculate regular grid from various data (scattered points, curves, surfaces, etc), conditions and inequalities by setting called gridding rules. surfit implements the original gridding method. surfit is an Open Source and Free Software, the source code is available free of charge under the Free Software GPL license. The code is written in C++ with STL usage. Careful attention is paid to performance related issues. The initial goal of surfit is to provide an efficient tool to scientists dealing with gridding computational tasks.

GGobi is an open source visualization program for exploring high-dimensional data. It provides highly dynamic and interactive graphics such as tours, as well as familiar graphics such as the scatterplot, barchart and parallel coordinates plots. Plots are interactive and linked with brushing and identification. It is based on the previous XGobi, and has a nice GUI developed with GTK. GGobi can:

• Draw dotplots and scatterplots, barcharts, spineplots and histograms, parallel coordinate plots, scatterplot matrices
• Link data points and lines between plots using persistent or transient brushing, and identification
• Pan and zoom
• Rotate data in 3D, and tour high-dimensional data using sequences of 1D, 2D and 2x1D projections augmented by manual control and automatic projection pursuit guidance
• Acts as a high-dimensional drawing tool, by adding, moving, and drawing lines between points.
• Connects with R
  

Veusz is a scientific plotting package written in Python. It uses PyQt (Wiki) and Numarray. Veusz is designed to produce publication-ready Postscript output.

Veusz provides a GUI, command line and scripting interface (based on Python) to its plotting facilities. The plots are built using an object-based system to provide a consistent interface.

Features include:

• X-Y plots (with errorbars)
• Images (with colour mappings)
• Stepped plots (for histograms)
• Line plots
• Function plots
• Stacked plots and arrays of plots
• Plot keys
• Plot labels
• LaTeX-like formatting for text
• EPS output
• Simple data importing
• Scripting interface
• Save/Load plots
• Dataset manipulation
• Embed Veusz within other programs