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:

VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range. VisIt was developed by the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI) to visualize and analyze the results of terascale simulations. It was developed as a framework for adding custom capabilities and rapidly deploying new visualization technologies. After an initial prototype effort, work on VisIt began in the summer of 2000, and the initial version of VisIt was released in the fall of 2002. Although the primary driving force behind the development of VisIt was for visualizing terascale data, it is also well suited for visualizing data from typical simulations on desktop systems. Because of its applicability beyond visualizing terascale data, VisIt was made freely available under the terms of the BSD license.

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