In ropensci/opencontext: API Client for the Open Context Archeological Database

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opencontext: An R API client for the Open Context archaeological data repository

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.

Installation

Install opencontext

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

library("opencontext")

Browse countries

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

Browse locations

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")

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.

Browse projects

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")

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).