7 R for Archaeology resources

There are more R-for-archaeology resources than it’s possible to keep up with. Here are some places to start.

7.1 Publications

For a brief review of books on quantitative methods in archaeology, see Drennan’s section on ‘Suggested Reading’ (2009, 321–25). More recent texts not covered there include include the 2nd edition of Baxter’s Exploratory multivariate Analysis in Archaeology (2015), VanPool and Leonard’s Quantitative Analysis in Archaeology (2011), McCall’s Strategies for Quantitative Research: Archaeology by Numbers (2018), Carlson’s Quantitative methods in Archaeology Using R (2017), and the first half of Banning’s The Archaeologist’s Laboratory (2020, Ch.1–8). Baxter’s Notes on Quantitative Archaeology and R (2015), available here though not formally published, is at least as cogent and useful as many things that are. There are also a few treatments of application of quantitative methods to particular kinds of archaeological data, such as Marston (2014) and Smith (2014) on archaeobotanical data and Gifford-Gonzales (2018) and Lyman (2008) on zooarchaeological data.

There are several recent chapters and papers presenting introduction to particular topics, especially multivariate (Glascock and MacDonald 2023; López-García and Argote 2026), Bayesian (E. Otárola-Castillo and Torquato 2018; E. R. Otárola-Castillo et al. 2022), and modeling (Crema 2025) approaches. There are even more examples of their application, particularly in spheres where analytical approaches are fundamental to data interpretation (for example in use of chemical compositional data); listing those is beyond what I can do here.

Archaeoriddle (Cortell-Nicolau et al. 2025) https://github.com/acortell3/archaeoriddle

7.2 Online Materials

7.3 Packages

7.3.1 Working with zooarchaeological data

The zoolog package (Zooarchaeological Analysis with Log-Ratios)
https://github.com/josempozo/zoolog
zooaRch https://rdrr.io/cran/zooaRch/

ZooArchGUI http://www.zooarchgui.org/

7.3.3 Working with chronological data

archSeries https://github.com/davidcorton/archSeries 

Joe Roe’s stratigraphr package: https://stratigraphr.joeroe.io/ 

ArchaeoPhases https://www.math.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/~philippe/ArchaeoPhases.html

Visualization of Date Ranges with datplot

7.3.4 Working with archaeological spatial data in R

leastcostpath https://github.com/josephlewis/leastcostpath

movecost

7.3.6 Visualizing archaeological data

archeoViz https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/archeoViz/index.html

7.3.7 Correspondence Analysis in R

cainterptools http://cainarchaeology.weebly.com/cainterprtools-r-package.html

7.3.9 Working with paleoecological stratigraphic data

These are probably most familiar from pollen data or the like. Try tidypaleohttps://github.com/paleolimbot/tidypaleo, described [here][https://dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2018/stratigraphic-diagrams-with-tidypaleo-ggplot2/]

7.3.10 ArchaeoSRP: An R Package for Extracting and Synthesizing Federal Cultural Resources Data for Research and Management

ArchaeoSRPhttps://github.com/seanbergin/archaeosrp/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-archaeological-practice/article/archaeosrp/92B9A22C434BABA191E76A1F3705AC53

7.4 General R Resources

The supply of resources for learning R is guaranteed to exceed your attention span. Generally speaking, I would suggest finding a few that you like, and using them as references rather than trying to read them all straight through. Here are a few to start with: