Hi, I’m Joe. I’m a computational archaeologist – I try to understand past societies using quantitative data, statistics, and computer models. In practice, that means I spend most of my time looking for interesting data and writing R code. I’m particularly interested in early prehistory, and my research to date has centered on the human ecology of prehistoric foragers in the arid fringes of Southwest Asia, between about 25,000 and 8,000 years ago. Sometimes I also get my hands dirty: I do fieldwork in eastern Jordan as part of the Epipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq project, and in the past have worked on field research in Iran, Oman, Ukraine, and Bulgaria.
I am currently working on the XRONOS project at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bern, and am also affiliated with the Centre for the Study of Early Agricultural Societies at the University of Copenhagen.
Recent activity
2024-09-19
Abstract This article presents the results of AMS radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and FRUITS dietary modelling to investigate dietary variability among sixty individuals buried at Varna in the mid-fifth millennium bc. The principal pattern was the isotopic clustering of some forty-three per cent of the population, which suggests a ‘Varna core diet’, with the remainder showing a wider variety of isotopic profiles. While...
2024-08-31
Abstract Exploring how waterfront communities coped with floods and long-term lake level changes in the prehistoric past is crucial for a deeper understanding of the vulnerabilities and resilience capabilities related to climate-driven hydrological hazards in the present and future. In this paper responses to climate change effects on lakeshore settlements during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in the Alpine region will be examined using...
2024-07-18
Abstract Surveying the first quarter-century of computer applications in archaeology, Scollar (1999) lamented that the field relied almost exclusively on ‘hand-me-down’ tools repurposed from other disciplines. Twenty-five years later, this is no longer the case: computational archaeologists often find themselves practising the dual roles of data analyst and research software engineer (Baxter et al. 2012; Schmidt and Marwick 2020), developing and applying new tools...
2024-06-08
Abstract Exploring how waterfront communities coped with floods and long-term lake level changes in the prehistoric past is crucial for a deeper understanding of the vulnerabilities and resilience capabilities related to climate-driven hydrological hazards in the present and future. In this paper responses to climate change effects on lakeshore settlements during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in the Alpine region will be examined using...
2024-01-09
This post describes how to set up continuous deployment to fly.io using Woodpecker, an open source continuous integration engine. The Fly documentation includes instructions on how to set up continuous deployment with GitHub Actions and with GitLab CI/CD, but I couldn’t find anything for Woodpecker. Fortunately, the process is almost identical to setting it up with GitLab CI/CD, so I could figure it out...
