arkygeek

archaeology, GIS, and the tools between

I'm Jason Jorgenson — an archaeologist whose work sits between the trowel and the terminal. The shape of most of my research is the same as the shape of this site: take something field-bound and old, build the tooling that lets you ask new questions of it. The thesis behind Landuse Analyst is one example — modelling the agricultural catchment of an Early Bronze Age settlement on the Jordan side of the Rift Valley (Tell esh-Shuna North), using a walking-cost surface from Tobler's 1993 hiking function plus a binary-search threshold sweep over per-crop suitability rasters. The QGIS plugin came first; the web port is more recent. The geography that keeps drawing me back is the southern Levant — Jordan, Israel, the western edge of the Fertile Crescent — during the long stretch when the first towns were inventing themselves and figuring out where to put their fields.

Most working days now are spent on the toolmaking half of that equation: writing simulation code, building maps that explain themselves, and trying to keep research software durable enough to outlast a paper. The fun, when it comes, is in compressing a body of fieldwork down to something a researcher elsewhere can load + run without three months of setup.

Projects

Get in touch

Email is the right channel — jjorgenson@gmail.com. I'm also reachable through the collaborators page on the Landuse Analyst site if you have a settlement of your own you'd like to model.