2025-02-06
Leben am See in Zeiten des Klimawandels – Klimaarchäologische Perspektiven auf bronzezeitliche «Pfahlbauten» im zirkum-alpinen Raum
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
2024-12-30
Late Pleistocene-Holocene mammalian body size change in Jordan’s Azraq Basin: A case for climate driven species distribution shifts
Abstract Mammalian body size diminution across the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene transition in the southern Levant has been much researched, with special focus on gazelle in Levantine Mediterranean zones. Explanations of body size diminutions in those cases include temperature increase and anthropogenic factors. This study examines body size shifts in three mammalian taxa – Gazella (gazelle), Lepus (hare) and Vulpes (fox) – between 24,000–7500 cal...
2024-12-05
XRONOS as a Resource for Archaeological Chronology in West Asia
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...
2024-11-20
era 0.5.0: chronological ordering and extremes
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:...
2024-11-08
Estimating the prevalance of post-agricultural population declines through the global radiocarbon record
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...