ZooaRch: General Audience Release of an R Graphical User Interface for Zooarchaeologists.

Summary

Zooarchaeologists evaluate fundamental and challenging questions about human nature. Many of these questions are answered through statistical modeling and hypothesis testing. However, statistical software tailored to answer zooarchaeological questions remain unavailable. To alleviate this problem, in 2016, we unveiled "zooaRch", a statistical software designed with zooarchaeological statistical problems in mind. ZooaRch is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Zooarchaeologists who wish to conduct analyses using the R statistical computing language. As such, zooaRch is open source and freely available to users. Here, we present the general audience release of the software. Following further development and pre-release testing, we increased the program’s stability and diversity of statistical tools. The current version of ZooaRch allows users to conduct a suite of common and specialized analyses including univariate statistics, "analyses of bone counts by maximum likelihood" (abcml), spatial statistics with GIS capabilities, multivariate, geometric morphometrics, and incipient Bayesian analyses. Moreover, zooaRch can display the underlying R-code. Beginning users interested in learning the R programming language will therefore experience an easier transition to the R computing environment. With this release, the zooaRch GUI makes the statistical power of the R language accessible to zooarchaeologists in research and teaching contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17274