Open source software is a critical dimension of synthesis in archaeology, providing tools to work with rapidly expanding digital archaeological datasets. It is also by its nature more accessible to and thus more inclusive of the wider archaeological community. The speed with which open source software grows and advances can be disorienting, however, making it hard to keep track of the kinds of functionality now available. This is even true (if you can believe it) of the relatively small part of that industry focused on tools for archaeology. Enter open-archaeo, a curated list of open source archaeological software and resources maintained by Zack Batist (among several other contributors). The website for open-archaeo is a smidge awkward to navigate, but what it lacks in design, it more than makes up for in being arguably the most comprehensive such list out there. This includes specialized software with user-friendly GUIs, but also packages written in more general purpose programming languages like R and Python. Check it out!
Have a look at https://open-archaeo.info/.
Note: for those more narrowly focused on discovering new R tools, check out Ben Marwick’s CRAN Task View for Archaeology on GitHub (https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology).