About

The tesselle project is a comprehensive collection of R packages tailored for archaeological research and education.

Yet another package

The use of programming languages in archaeological research has witnessed a notable surge in the last decade, particularly with R (Schmidt and Marwick 2020), a versatile statistical computing language that fosters the development of specialized packages. There are currently more than 22,000 packages available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), so there is more than enough to cover most analytical needs. Thanks to the collective efforts of the community, a wealth of high-quality packages tailored to archaeology have been developed.

The tesselle packages are centered on quantitative analysis methods specifically crafted for archaeology. They are designed to complement both general-purpose and other specialized statistical packages. These packages serve as a versatile toolbox, facilitating the exploration and analysis of common data types in archaeology, such as count data, compositional data or chronological data, and enabling the construction of reproducible workflows. Complementary packages for visualization, data preparation, and educational resources augment the tesselle ecosystem.

This collection of R packages aims to contribute to the development of open-source computational archaeology (Batist and Roe 2023). The project’s inception, its objectives, design principles, and key components are outlined in Frerebeau (2024).

The project has reached a stable state and is being actively developed, with transparency and reliability in mind:

Fell free to contribute!

Contributors

The tessel project is maintained by Nicolas Frerebeau.

Brice Lebrun designed the project and package logos.

Contributors to the project include (list by name): Vincent Arel-Bundock, Jean-Baptiste Fourvel, Brice Lebrun, Ben Marwick, Matthew Peeples, Anne Philippe, Joe Roe.

Institutional support

This project is supported by:

IR* Huma-Num UAR 3598
54, boulevard Raspail
F-75006 Paris
www.huma-num.fr

Logo IR* Huma-Num

Archéosciences Bordeaux UMR 6034
Maison de l’Archéologie
Université Bordeaux Montaigne
F-33607 Pessac cedex
www.archeosciences-bordeaux.fr

Logo Archéosciences Bordeaux

Centre de Recherche et d’Etudes pour l’Art Préhistorique MSHS-Toulouse (UAR 3414)
Maison de la Recherche
Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès
F-31058 Toulouse cedex 9
mshs.univ-toulouse.fr

References

Batist, Zachary, and Joe Roe. 2023. “Open-Archaeo: A Resource for Documenting Archaeological Software Development Practices.” Journal of Open Archaeology Data 11 (September): 9. https://doi.org/10.5334/joad.111.
Chambers, John, M. 2020. “S, R, and Data Science.” The R Journal 12 (1): 462. https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2020-028.
Frerebeau, Nicolas. 2024. “The ’tesselleProject: A Collection of R Packages for Research and Teaching in Archaeology.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 12 (4): 424–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2024.10.
Schmidt, Sophie C., and Ben Marwick. 2020. “Tool-Driven Revolutions in Archaeological Science.” Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology 3 (1): 18–32. https://doi.org/10.5334/jcaa.29.