fabryka. A web application for easily analysing & exploring the fabric of archaeological assemblages
Marc Thomas · Peer Community Journal · 2025
This article presents fabryka 1.1, an open access R shiny web application dedicated to the fabric analysis of archaeological or geological assemblages. The fabric is a statistic made of the orientation and dip of elongated particles and archaeological objects. It provides information about the nature of the geological processes involved in the formation of the deposits and their impact on the preservation of the archaeological assemblages. This statistical analysis is not easily accessible to non-specialists and is particularly time-consuming, sometimes requiring the use of several software, some of which are chargeable. fabryka uses classical analytical procedures (Benn, rose, Schmidt and Woodcock diagrams and statistical tests on orientations) for analysing the fabrics of objects and includes a spatial method. New statistical methods and new ways of exploration are proposed in the application and in this present article. You can use fabryka by following this link https://marchaeologist.shinyapps.io/fabryka/ or by launching the application in Rstudio thanks to its script. The fabryka application files, made in R (R Core Team 2025) by using the R package shiny (Chang et al. 2024), and this article, written in rmarkdown (Allaire et al. 2014; Xie, Allaire, and Grolemund 2018; Xie, Dervieux, and Riederer 2020), are both available online in a public github repository ( https://github.com/marchaeologist/fabryka/tree/main ).