Arm Chair Archaeology App

On these boards we often discuss archaeological finds with little access to the actual data recovered by archaeologists in the field. Sometimes, we are lucky enough to have actual academic articles posted, but often these articles are not a great source of actual data. Many dismiss the articles conclusions as "mainstream" interpretations. I've always thought it would be awesome if people here, could objectively look at collected data from real world dig sites and argue their own interpretation of the data. It seems now you can

In a couple months a cool new "arm chair archaeology app" will give people like you and me access to actual archaeological data, for free. I hope this app isn't childish and actually provides robust information, but none the less, I think the idea of sharing data and making it part of the public domain is awesome for the field of archaeology and may be of great use to discussion boars such as this one.

check out this story on the app. Arm Chair Archaelogy News Story

reply to post by IndianaJoe


That's good news, I've been asking myself the same question: can we ever get hands on actual data? Wikipedia sometimes isn't up-to-date and related scientific papers are often difficult to find (and laborious in terms of evaluating the findings).

However:

The still unnamed mobile platform Ross is building runs on Android, and all the software is open source. The app should be available some time next year.

... which means we gotta wait and I don't even know whether I could actually do anything with that raw information!? But for all the others out there, it'd probably be a good thing (and for the overall quality of the threads in this forum)!

Nice find, S&F!

reply to post by IndianaJoe


getting hold of the data is all very well, but having the skills and background knowledge to interpret it is a different matter - no doubt such an app could be valuable though and at least mean that the info could be put out to the community to allow us all to put forwards our views on it etc... as said above, many in-depth articles and pieces of credible research are available on the net that give us interpretations by professionals and so on, it just takes a bit of digging... it's worth noting though that researchers in the field of archaeology (etc etc) want to make important and ground breaking discoveries just as much as folk here, they just apply more rationale and rely on actual evidence (rather than unqualified speculation) than some posters here.

reply to post by IndianaJoe


SnF for the heads up. I'll be keeping an eye out for the app when it's released.

Long live Android OS!