ASTR defines and implements a community reporting standard for archaeometric datasets. It also provides easy-to-use functions for common plots, statistical analyses, data processing, and data transformation workflows in archaeometry.
Overview
ASTR aims to increase reproducibility of data processing by facilitating the use of scripting languages in archeometry in the narrower sense, i.e., the material scientific investigation of usually inorganic archaeological materials.
Community reporting standard
The community reporting standard defines a set of conventions on the structure and naming of datasets to make them interoperable and allow automated handling of the data. Based on these conventions, ASTR
- Recognises and seamlessly isotopic and chemical data, their units, and analytical precision,
- Handles unit conversion on the fly, including non-SI units such as ppm, at%, and cps (counts per second) and between oxides and elements
Tools
The collection provides easy-to-use functions for a wide range of tasks such as
- ggplot2 geoms for standard plots (e.g., spidergrams, KDE)
- Material classification (e.g., copper types)
- Data transformation and processing (e.g., calculation of δ-values from standard-sample-bracketing measurements)
- Data conversion (e.g., calculation of lead isotope age model parameters)
- Statistics (e.g. distribution of data in a pointcloud of reference data)
- Normalisation of data to standard compositions (e.g., chondritic composition)
- Unit conversion (e.g., at% to wt% and vice versa)
See the full list on the package website.
Functions do not expect datasets according to the community reporting standard but default values for their input follow its conventions, making them particularly easy to use.
Installation
You can install the development version of ASTR from GitHub with:
install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("archaeothommy/ASTR")Getting started
We recommend reading the following resources to become familiar with the package:
- Community reporting standard: Conventions and their explanation
Contributing and Code of Conduct
Please read our contributor guide to learn how to contribute to ASTR. The ASTR project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.
Acknowledgements and funding
ASTR was initiated in the workshop Towards an Archaeological Science Toolbox in R “ASTR” at the Lorentz Center in Leiden (The Netherlands). In addition to the in-kind funding of the Lorentz Center, the workshop received funding from the Stichting Nederlands Museum voor Anthropologie en Praehistorie (Foundation for Anthropology and Prehistory in the Netherlands). The workshop and further development of ASTR received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project 571205551.