Lithics3D

Lithics3D provides a toolbox for working with 3D scans of archaeological lithics (and other objects) within the R environment. The functions included herein are designed to work with clean triangular meshes. For the time being at least, mesh generation and pre-processing (e.g. cleaning) must be done with different tools (e.g. Meshlab).

The included functions can be divided into three broad categories:

• High-level functions for (semi-)automatic segmentation and analysis of meshes qua archaeological artifacts (e.g. utilities for automatically measuring edge angles, mapping artifact thickness).

• Low-level functions for working with meshes as geometric objects. These functions are meant to provide the building blocks required to implement more complex functionality.

• Interactive functions for visual mesh processing (e.g., selecting points and paths of interest on the object's surface).

Warning: A note on current status

This package incorporates functions written over a period of several years. Some of these functions are far more experimental than others, and there are many naming inconsistencies which are slowly being resolved. You can expect function names to change without notice, but all functions added in or since the v0.4.0 release will continue working as originally documented until version 1 of the package.

Given the experimental nature of some of the functions included in this package you are strongly encouraged to double check your results and contact me for help or clarification, or better yet, open an issue (see Lithics3D Issues)! More generally, be mindful of the fact that this is very much a work in progress.

Getting started

Installation

If you haven't done so already, install devtools in R:

install.packages("devtools")

Once devtools is available you can install Lithics3D from github with the following R commands:

require(devtools)
install_github("cornelmpop/Lithics3D", dependencies=T, build_vignettes=T)

Using Lithics3D

For basic information about the package, including a list of available functions and data, please load the package and consult the manual:

library(Lithics3D)
?Lithics3D

You should also explore the available vignette (a work in progress!) or contribute your own (contributions are very welcome!). To view the Lithics3D vignette:

vignette("Lithics3D")