Welcome. This wiki is dedicated to the development of free documentation about quantitative methods in archaeology, using free/open source software. This means that:

1. you can contribute and improve the existing documentation, even with small pieces
2. you should contribute documentation about free and open source software (but general documentation about algorithms and statistical methods is also good)
3. anyone will be able to read, edit and possibly improve your contributions

The documentation is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. This gives to everyone the freedom to modify and redistribute copies of the content, even for commercial purposes. Follow the link to the license page to learn more about your rights.

A brief TODO list will be helpful to coordinate our work.

This wiki uses DokuWiki as backend. Documentation for editors is available on the Dokuwiki website. A brief syntax reference can be accessed from each page while editing.

The Quantitative Archaeology Wiki is hosted and promoted by IOSA.it, a project by grupporicerche.

Our first attempt is to rewrite the exercises for the textbook “Digging Numbers” by Fletcher and Lock using the R statistical software. This part is still in development, so if you can help, please do it.

☛ Go to the Digging Numbers exercises.

This is a method to calculate with enhanced precision the chronological distribution of archaeological artefacts that have long time spans.

☛ Go to the weighted means page

This is a basic introduction to frequency and contingency tables using R. A function for plotting Ford “battleship” diagrams is presented.

☛ Go to the contingency tables page

Tutorials about spatial analysis techniques using free geospatial software like GRASS, R and others.

☛ Go to the spatial analysis introduction page

We are collecting references to published manuals and journals about Quantitative Archaeology in this section.

There's an international mailing list to discuss about quantitative methods, free software in archaeology, open formats and more. The list is kindly hosted by the Italian Linux Society.

Here's a list of recent posts:

• Call for Papers 2010. Archeomatica, Cultural Heritage Technologies by Michele Fasolo (2009/12/30 17:07)
• [Fwd: [archeofoss-comitato] archeoFOSS 2010 - call for papers] by Stefano Costa (2009/12/17 09:31)
• AAA 2009 Call for Papers on "Google Earth, Open Source and other Emerging Spatial Technologies: Innovation and Application inArchaeology" by Illya Santos (2009/09/01 07:29)

A number of websites deal with some of the topics this wiki is about:

• http://www.iosa.it/ (English)
• http://www.arc-team.com/ (English, German, Italian)
• Benjamin Ducke (German)
• http://www.archeogr.unisi.it/asiaa/ (Italian)