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.
Abstract XRONOS is an open data infrastructure for the backbone of the archaeological record – chronology. It provides open access to published radiocarbon dates and other chronometric data from any period, anywhere in the world. In this talk, we introduce XRONOS and with an eye on its coverage of West Asia. This currently comprises 22,739 records of radiocarbon dates ranging from 50,000 BP to...
era v0.5.0 is now available on CRAN: install.packages("era") This minor release adds functions for chronological ordering (yr_sort()) of year vectors: # Forward-counting era: x <- yr(c(200, 100, 300), "CE") yr_earliest(x) #> # CE years <yr[1]>: #> [1] 100 #> # Era: Common Era (CE): Gregorian years (365.2425 days), counted forwards from 0 yr_latest(x) #> # CE years <yr[1]>: #> [1] 300 #> # Era:...
Abstract “Boom and bust” population dynamics are inferred to have followed the emergence or introduction of agriculture in several parts of the world. However, it is not currently understood whether this trend is intrinsic to prehistoric agriculture or contingent on other factors. Here we show how two large recently-available open archaeological datasets—XRONOS and ArchaeoGLOBE—can extend the geographic scope of previous analyses and reach an...
Abstract Understanding population trends over the past 12,000 years is crucial for unraveling the complexities of social development. Population size influences social structures, exchange systems, environmental interactions, cultural transmission, and societal resilience. Current global population figures, derived since the 1970s, are educated guesses based on limited data and deductive methods, hindering accurate prehistoric assessments. Regional studies, emerging data sources, and innovative methods offer new...
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...