Report: R is for Archaeology

From the report:

The Society of American Archaeology (SAA) is one of the largest professional organisations for archaeologists in the world, and just concluded its annual meeting in Vancouver, BC at the end of March. The R language has been a part of this meeting for more than a decade, with occasional citations of R Core in the posters, and more recently, the distinctive ggplot2 graphics appearing infrequently on posters and slides. However, among the few archaeologists that have heard of R, it has a reputation for being difficult to learn and use, idiosyncratic, and only suitable for highly specialized analyses. Generally, archaeology students are raised on Excel and SPSS. This year, a few of us thought it was time to administer some first aid to R’s reputation among archaeologists and generally broaden awareness of this wonderful tool. We developed a plan for this year’s SAA meeting to show our colleagues that R is not too hard to learn, it is useful for almost anything that involves numbers, and it has lots of fun and cool people that use it to get their research done quicker and easier.

Read more here.