Folio: 30 Curated Datasets for Archaeological and Palaeontological Teaching

Folio is a collection of datasets curated for teaching archaeology and paleontology, maintained by the tesselle organization. Updated as recently as December 2025, the project provides standardized data for archaeological science education within the R programming environment.

Use Cases

• Teaching quantitative methods in archaeology using R-based datasets
• Demonstrating paleontological data structures to students in a classroom setting
• Testing archaeological science algorithms on standardized teaching data

Strengths

• Curated specifically for educational use in archaeological science
• Open-source GPL-3.0 license allows for academic redistribution
• Maintained by the tesselle research group, specialists in archaeological R packages

Limitations

• Unknown record counts and column definitions without installing the R package
• Requires an R programming environment for native access to the data objects
• Primary repository has migrated from GitHub to Codeberg, which may affect automated discovery

Provenance

Source

tesselle (archaeological science research group)

Collection Method

Curated from various archaeological and paleontological studies for pedagogical purposes.

Freshness

The repository was updated in December 2025, indicating active maintenance.