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Over the last decades, Harold Dibble and Shannon McPherron wrote a number of programs to bring technological solutions to problems of the excavation, data collection and analysis of archaeological collections. Our philosophy from the start was to apply technology to make archaeology more efficient and at the same time less error prone. We also innovated new ways to collect and analyze data to say something about site formation processes.

Throughout it all, we made a concerted effort to publish our methods and to share the programs freely. We wrote programs for our own research, but we also tried to find ways to keep them generalized enough that other can use them as well.

On this web site, we have posted our software. It has been a challenge to keep this software running over the years with all the changes in operating systems, programming languages and hardware. As a result, some of our programs are reaching their end. In the mean time, Shannon McPherron is looking for ways to given them new life. For instance, he is working on a Python version of EDM in an effort to make it cross-platform and open source, and a Python version of the E4 program (now called E5) can be found on his GitHub page.

Please do not hesitate to contact Shannon McPherron if you have question about these programs or how to computerize your project.