Automatic Soil Texture Triangle

As the regular ATOR readers know, since some years we are trying to improve our laboratory's technologies in order to achieve a better metric classification of archaeological data and to expand our research interests in other archaeological sub-disciplines and mainly in archaeo-anthropology (as well as taphonomy and mummiology), archaeo-zoology, archaeo-bothany in general (and carpology and dendrochronology in particular), geoarchaeology and archaeometry. 

Soon we will start a series of post about our lab (aka ATLAB, Arc-Team LABoratory), which is evolving fast thanks to the effort of +Gianluca Fondriest  and +Mattia Segata.

Today I want to illustrate one of the tool we developed to speed up the geo-archaeological interpretation of the soil texture of the different layers during our excavations. This project (which is now in its early stage) starts from the need to use the Soil Texture Triangle to help archaeologists (especially the new diggers) in correctly interpreting the texture components using an objective method like the sedimentation test (because often new archaeologists are not comfortable with more subjective analysis like the Ribbon test or the squeeze-ball test). I leave the explanations of the operations to perform on the field for another post, while I want here to show the small software "geTexture", which +Giuseppe Naponiello developed to use automatically the Soil Texture Triangle from internet.
To illustrate how the application works, I recorded a short videotutorial:

The software is currently just in Italian, but we will translate it in English soon. The development is still active and this can be considered just a pre-release (it will be implemented also with a tutorial explaining how to perform the sedimentation test on the excavation). If you want to help us, on GitHub you can find the source code, while if you need already to use the software, here is the link where is is accessible. In the next days I will try to program also a small app for Android devices.

Stay tuned and have a nice day!

Notes

Some of the results of ATLAB can be seen in the article "Lo Scavo archeologico professionale, innovazioni e best practice mediante metodologie aperte e Open Research" (here in ResearchGate and here in Academia)

Arc-Team "Intervallo" 4

As you notice, ATOR post are getting fewer and fewer in summer time, due to our work on the field: time for a break!

In the meantime we will go on in collecting data and doing test for future post and articles, keeping our "open research" available for everybody!

Stay tuned!

QGIS - Reshape Features

This short Videotutorial shows you the effect of QGIS "Reshape Features" tool on vector lines.
If you have time to clean and smooth vector-lines manually, you can try that possibility.

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Arc-Team: Open your Mind and share your Knowledge

Arc-Team Archaeology was founded in 2004 as a way to open Archaeology to people through a free & open approach.

Since the first day we have shared our experiences with this type of research with our friends and colleagues.

We are still searching for new horizons and there is no better way than being able to open our mind and share our knowledge.

Let's go on collaborating and sharing our results, our techniques and our experiences!