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: # ...
Posts
Miscellaneous updates, reviews, short essays and how-to guides. My posts about R are aggregated by R-bloggers.
2024
Deploy a Fly app with Woodpecker CI
This post describes how to set up continuous deployment to fly.io using Woodpecker, an open source continuous integration engine. The Fly documentation inclu...
2023
rpaleoclim v1.0.0: paleoclimate data in R
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, o...
What did the first farmers actually farm?
Eight so-called founder crops—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, lentil, pea, chickpea, bitter vetch, and flax—have long been thought to have been the bedro...
2022
Graham Hancock is right about pseudoarchaeology on Wikipedia
In a recent interview on a popular podcast, pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock had this to say about Wikipedia: [T]he point about Wikipedia is, that’s th...
Wikipedia is the best way to counter pseudoarchaeology
I was glad to see a brief nod to @Wikipedia in a recent Input article on pseudoarchaeology in social media. Its importance in countering pseudoarchaeology an...
2021
Dodgy radiocarbon modelling at Tell el-Hammam (not-Sodom)
A recent paper in the Nature Group’s Scientific Reports claimed that Tell el-Hammam, a prehistoric site in Jordan, was destroyed by a “Tunguska-sized airburs...
era 0.3.1: year-based time scales in R
era v0.3.1 is now available on CRAN: install.packages("era") I wrote about the basic concept of the package in my last post. It provides a representation ...
2020
Beta release of era
era is a small R package for working with different year numbering systems. There are a few systems in use in archaeology, geology, and other palaeosciences;...
#30DayMapChallenge Day 5: Late Quaternary Precipitation in Southwest Asia
The theme for day 5 of the #30DayMapChallenge is “blue”. My submission is a map of simulated rainfall in Southwest Asia during key climate periods in the Lat...
#30DayMapChallenge 2020
The #30DayMapChallenge is an event challenging cartographers to make a map on a given theme on each day in November 2020. Maps are submitted under a Twitt...
A 6,000 year old city in Ukraine
6,000 years ago the world’s largest settlements weren’t in Mesopotamia, the Indus, or China, but the steppes of modern-day Ukraine. These ‘mega-sites’ are pu...
2019
Computational archaeology, digital archaeology, and associated ologies
Archaeologists like to define themselves by their material. Asked “what do you work on?” at a conference, their response will most likely be something like z...
2017
Lactose intolerance around the world
Most of us in the western world take drinking milk for granted, but the ability to digest lactose into adulthood is actually relatively uncommon from a globa...
2016
Trowelblazers on Wikipedia: Margaret Ursula Jones
Wikipedia is the world’s most widely read reference work but it has a well known systematic bias towards the interests of affluent, Western, young geeky men:...
Does archaeology have a reproducibility crisis?
The reproducibility crisis! It’s shaking the very foundations of the ivory tower. Reportedly the psychology wing is already in rubble. Medical researchers ar...
#ChromeScience: Dave Hughes on Chromebooks for science and teaching
I’ve written a little bit before about using Chromebooks and the Google ecosystem for research, specifically using RStudio Server on a Google Cloud Compute i...
Edge Annual Question 2016
This years Edge Annual Question asked their assorted eminent scholars to pick the most interesting scientific news from the last few years. The result is a n...
2015
Say Hello to Hugo
Hello, Hugo! If you’ve noticed the blog looks very different to how it did yesterday, it’s because I’ve migrated it from Wordpress to Hugo – a lovely little...
RStudio Server on a Google Compute Engine instance
When I started my PhD I decided to make my trusty fieldwork laptop – a Google Chromebook – my main work computer and try to do all my research in the cloud...
Excavating at Kharaneh IV
I wrote a brief guest post for the Kharaneh IV blog, an Epipalaeolithic site in Jordan where I’ve been working the last few weeks: I spent last week di...
2014
Popular anthropology? Jared Diamond is the best we’ve got
Part 2 of Alex Posecznick’s delightful series on anthropologists as scholarly hipsters for Savage Minds sums up for me the problem of why the discipline can’...
Genetic Astrology
(Via John Hawks) Genetic Astrology chronicles the saga of Alistair Moffat’s shameful attempt to use libel law to silence scientific criticism of his genetic ...
A Genetic Atlas of Human History
Hellenthal et al. introduced a new method for detecting and dating genetic admixture events in Science last week. The ins-and-outs of their analysis is, hone...
Not so civilised
The way the word ‘civilisation’ is bandied about in popular writing about ancient history has always bugged me. Most archaeologists must be well aware of how...
2013
Little Red Riding Hood and the Second Wave Phylomemeticists
Jamie Tehrani has a very imaginative paper in PLOS ONE on The Phylogenetics of Little Red Riding Hood: Researchers have long been fascinated by the str...