About this site

What the heck is Archaeoinformatics?

Archaeoinformatics is a relatively new term and field. It is a bridge between Archaeology and Computer Sciences, very similar to Bioinformatics or Geoinformatics. The term combines Computational and Digital Archaeology. Computational Archaeology is concerned with mathematical, data-driven solutions to archaeological research questions. Digital Archaeology is more focussed on visualisation, documentation and preservation. So, Archaeoinformatics is a subdiscipline of Archaeology and offers computational and visual solutions for archaeological problems.

Why this site then?

This site is a collection of news, reports, ideas and general thoughts about the topic. As our knowledge and understanding of Archaeoinformatics grows, this site will also become more comprehensive over time. For now, we offer five basic categories: Archaeogaming, Computational Archaeology, Digital Archaeology, Teaching & Learning as well as general thoughts and our own projects.

Sometimes Archaeoinformatics can be very geeky. We are not only talking about videogames or drones, but also dive deep into Python programming or statistics with R. We therefore decided to mark every post with a Nerd-Alert™, indicating how “nerdy” an article is. A green symbol shows that the post is easy to understand by nearly everyone. An orange symbol indicates moderate nerdiness, as you would find in a post about special software or with a deeper theoretical background. Posts with a red symbol however are pretty nerdy and therefore only for you, if you are already familiar with the topic in question.

Ok, cool, what’s the plan?

Good question! We don’t know where the journey goes, but we offer other people interested in the field to publish with us. Students are very welcome too! The Archaeoinformatics community is young, still growing and we want to promote the field to a wider audience. So if you feel that you can contribute something to this page, let us know through our contact form. If you don’t want to contribute, be part of the discussion though our comment section. Besides that, we are happy if you share our articles via various social media channels, so more people will find their way to us.