This packages enables browsing and downloading data from Open Context using R. Open Context reviews, edits, and publishes archaeological research data and archives data with university-backed repositories, including the California Digital Library.

Install opencontext

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("mfindeisen/opencontext")

library("opencontext")

To browse the countries that Open Context has data on:

countries <- oc_browse("countries")

The result is a data frame that include the names of the countries in countries$label. URLs that we can use to get more information about what projects, etc. are available for each country in countries$id

To browse the locations for one country, for example, Turkey:

library("dplyr", warn.conflicts = FALSE)
locations <- oc_browse(type = "countries") %>%
   filter(label == "Turkey") %>%
   oc_get_countries(type = "location")
#> Getting data for Turkey

To browse the names of locations that have archaeological data in Turkey, run locations$label. We can see that the first location in this example is Çatalhöyük.

To inspect the projects available for a location in a country, for example, for Çatalhöyük in Turkey:

projects_at_Çatalhöyük_Turkey <- oc_get_locations("Turkey", "Çatalhöyük")
#> Getting data for Turkey
#> Getting data for Çatalhöyük

Once again, the label column has the names of the projects: projects_at_Çatalhöyük_Turkey$label.

With a little further effort we can browse excavation/survey areas within the project, and get datasets of measurements of objects collected from these areas (along with chronological and spatial data for these objects).

Now that we've identified a specific project, we can ingest data from that project into our R session.