In recent years, R has silently become the workhorse for many quantitative archaeologists. It's open source, platform-independent and can be linked very well with other programming languages. As an interpreted language with simple and flexible syntax it is easy to learn but hard to master. Due to its huge community, spanning from hobbyist to commercial data scientists and researchers from scientific fields like statistics, ecology or linguistics, the catalogue for freely available packages is enormous and continuously growing. The foundation of the R-Consortium, a group of corporations highly invested in R, including Microsoft, IBM and Google, pushed the language and its abilities further ahead. Nevertheless, there are still many colleagues who have not yet realised the potential of the language and how easy it is today to conduct high quality research with the available tools. This is reflected by the fact that the workflow of many students of archaeology is at best still limited to Excel or SPSS. The solutions for archaeological problems in R are already manifold -- although maybe developed for a different purpose. For example spatial analysis, multivariate statistics and scientific visualisation are well reflected within popular R packages, which makes it a very useful tool for archaeological research, teaching and publication. R also provides an advanced environment to produce truly reproducible research, which will be of growing importance in the future of scientific dialogue. Within this session we would like to explore the state of the art and the potential application of R in archaeology. We invite presentations for this session that explore questions like (but not limited to): * What are the specific benefits of this statistical framework in the eyes of its users? * What are the possibilities? What are the limits? * What future directions might the usage of R in archaeology have? * Which archaeological package has been developed, and which package still has to be developed to improve the usability of the software for archaeologists? * What has to be considered to optimise the workflow with R? We especially would like to attract colleagues who might present archaeological R packages that are ready or in the making and demonstrate their relevance for archaeological analysis. Also we would like to encourage potential presenters to demonstrate their research approaches via live coding, for which we would support them in ensuring that their presentations will work offline and on foreign hardware. If desired, we would like to publish the session and the code in an open online book embedded with runnable code. We hope to foster a productive and inclusive exchange between both young and experienced users from all backgrounds.
