The MedAfriCarbon database and web application

The MedAfrica Project set out to produce the first comprehensive, empirical and interpretative synthesis of long-term social and economic dynamics on the African flank of the Mediterranean between the beginning of the Holocene (ca. 9600 BC) and the arrival of Phoenicians and Greeks (between 800 and 600 BC), and to identify major factors shaping the patterns detected. To address these questions, a large and up-to-date database of published radiocarbon dates was assembled with a systematic association of key cultural markers (e.g. presence/absence of domestic/wild species and material culture elements), allowing the first comprehensive chronological and cultural story for the prehistory of this region to emerge for a generation. These questions are explored as part of the interpretative synthesis presented in Broodbank and Lucarini (2019). The final database is presented here in the form of a user-friendly web app, to facilitate data exploration and informal analysis. For more information about the database, see the open data publication Lucarini et al. (2020), or click on the Download tab. The MedAfricaCarbon web app provides a graphical interface to explore the MedAfrica database, based on the Shiny platform (Chang et al. 2019). The app is structured as a tabbed dashboard with six major tabs (About; Map explorer; Dates explorer; Individual calibration; SPD (beta); Download; Bibliography). The default tab on opening the app is the Map explorer. Some of the tabs are synchronised, so that, for example, a filter selection made in the Map explorer will also appear in the Dates explorer and vice-versa. The Calibration and SPD tabs are linked but not synchronised to the explorer tabs.