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
2025-06-26
Abstract XRONOS (https://xronos.ch) 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. By collating a large number of existing regional and global compilations of dates, XRONOS offers the most comprehensive radiocarbon database yet published, with over 350,000 radiocarbon and 75,000...
2025-05-06
Abstract There are now quite a large number of R packages for chronological modelling (Marwick et al. 2023). These include methods developed specifically by or for archaeologists as well as those borrowed from adjacent fields. Many other types of analysis incorporate chronological data in an ad hoc way. As the range and complexity of these analytic procedures increases, it is can be difficult to...
2025-05-06
Abstract Chronological networks (Levy et al. 2021) are a robust new approach to formally modelling complex chronologies drawn from archaeological and historic data. The method has been implemented in the software ChronoLog, which provides a graphical user interface for interactively building and evaluating chronological network models. Here we introduce a new implementation of chronological networks in the R statistical programming language. The chronologr package...
2025-05-06
Abstract Radiocarbon (^14C) dating is a fundamental tool in archaeology and related disciplines for establishing chronological frameworks. Calibration of radiocarbon dates is essential to account for fluctuations in atmospheric ^14C over time, and Bayesian statistical methods have become increasingly important for refining these calibrations with additional information. For decades, OxCal has been the dominant software for radiocarbon calibration, particularly renowned for its ability to...
