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
2023-11-27
An open peer review of: Löwenborg D and Antomonov F. Inglämnlagare: a tool for restructuring Swedish HER record site data for statistical analysis [version 2; peer review: 3 approved]. F1000Research 2023, 11:1370. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.126484.2 Review The article describes a Python script that transforms data from the Swedish Historic Environment Record (HER) into a format more amenable for programmatic data analysis. Inglämnlagare addresses an increasingly common...
2023-10-07
Abstract Late Epipalaeolithic and Early Neolithic societies in the Levant were amongst the first in the world to begin cultivating wild plants and, eventually, domesticating crops. The transition is well-documented in the archaeobotanical record and other palaeoecological proxies from this period, however these give ‘snapshots’ of flora at particular times and places, usually significantly conditioned by human action and various taphonomic processes. We cannot...
2023-09-11
Abstract Open-archaeo (https://open-archaeo.info) is a comprehensive list of open software and resources created by and for archaeologists. It is a living collection—itself an open project—which as of writing includes 548 entries and associated metadata. Open-archaeo documents what kinds of software and resources archaeologists have produced, enabling further investigation of research software engineering and digital peer-production practices in the discipline, both under-explored aspects of archaeological...
2023-05-26
Part of a workshop on “Untelling the Neolithic of Southwest Asia”, convened by Tobias Richter and Martin Renger. Abstract Nearly a century after the theory was first articulated, the Neolithic Revolution seems all but buried under the weight of new evidence and critique. We now know that the agricultural transition in Southwest Asia was protracted and dispersed; that permanent settled societies may have brought...
2023-05-02
PaleoClim (Brown et al. 2018, Scientific Data) is a set of high-resolution paleoclimate surfaces covering the whole world. The data is derived from HadCM3, one of the major ‘general circulation models’ that is used to forecast climate change, turned backwards to ‘predict’ conditions for key climate periods in the past. This is then ‘downscaled’ to a high spatial resolution (up to 2.5 minutes) using modern...
