Home¶
prospect is a Python package to build and run simulations of archaeological surveys. It is designed to be a flexible tool that can be run with some sensible defaults or highly customized, depending on the user’s needs.
Development was started by Jacob Deppen as part of his Ph.D. research in the Digital Archaeology Research Lab at the University of Washington.
The source code for prospect (and these docs) is available at github.com/deppen8/prospect.
How to use this guide¶
This user guide is intended to serve all users of the prospect package, from beginner to advanced.
This guide contains summaries and walkthroughs of prospect’s features, mixing text and code. Many of the pages are built from Jupyter notebooks and can be run in the cloud on MyBinder (the rocketship icon at the top of the page) or downloaded and run locally (download icon -> .ipynb).
The site also contains the full technical documentation for the prospect Python package under the API DOCS section.
This guide does assume some familiarity with Python syntax for things like importing external packages, assigning variables, calling functions, and common data types like strings, lists, dictionaries, pandas DataFrames and numpy arrays. However, it is my hope that users who are acquainted with similar languages like R should find a lot of familiar ground. When developing prospect, wherever possible, I tried to give preference to more common data structures and simpler syntax.