zoolog: Zooarchaeological Analysis with Log-Ratios
Angela Trentacoste, Ariadna Nieto-Espinet, Silvia Guimarães Chiarelli and Silvia Valenzuela-Lamas
The R package zoolog includes functions and reference data to generate and manipulate log-ratios (also known as log size index (LSI) values) from measurements obtained on zooarchaeological material. Log ratios are used to compare the relative (rather than the absolute) dimensions of animals from archaeological contexts (Meadow 1999, ISBN: 9783896463883). zoolog is also able to seamlessly integrate data and references with heterogeneous nomenclature, which is internally managed by a zoolog thesaurus. A preliminary version of the zoolog methods was first used by Trentacoste, Nieto-Espinet, and Valenzuela-Lamas (2018) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208109.
Find more details in the zoolog documentation.
Installation
You can install the released version of zoolog from CRAN with:
install.packages("zoolog")And the development version from GitHub with:
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("josempozo/zoolog@HEAD", build_vignettes = TRUE)Acknowledgements
Several fellow colleagues helped building the Thesaurus and tested the code, increasing its robustness: Moussab Albesso, Canan Cakirlar, Jwana Chahoud, Jacopo De Grossi, Dimitrios Filioglou, Armelle Gardeisen, Sierra Harding, Pilar Iborra, Michael MacKinnon, Nimrod Marom, Claudia Minniti, Francesca Slim, Barbara Stopp, and Emmanuelle Vila. We are grateful to them for their comments and help.
We are particularly grateful to Sabine Deschler-Erb and Barbara Stopp, from the University of Basel (Switzerland) for making the reference values of several specimens available through the ICAZ Roman Period Working Group, which have been included here with their permission. We also thank Francesca Slim and Dimitris Filioglou from the University of Groningen, Claudia Minniti from University of Salento, Sierra Harding and Nimrod Marom from the University of Haifa, Carly Ameen and Helene Benkert from the University of Exeter, and Mikolaj Lisowski from the University of York for providing additional reference sets. Allowen Evin (CNRS-ISEM Montpellier) saw potential pitfalls in the use of Davis' references for sheep, which have been now solved.