Computational Archaeology Lab

The Computational Archaeology Lab produces and supports the production of new open-source software for historical and archaeological research. Software is primarily developed using the R programming language and the Shiny R package is employed to build user-friendly interfaces. Bayesian modelling is extensively employed and applications include, spatiotemporal modelling of a variety of past phenomena from uncertain data and the probabilistic reconstruction of past human lifeways, productive activities, and paleo-environmental/climatic conditions from different types of proxy data. The lab is also developing different machine learning tools (e.g., Bayesian model selection, Bayesian Networks) to study historical causation. Artificial intelligence research is being pursued to collect expert opinions, assess quality of expert statements, and to compose historical narratives.