arkygeek
archaeology, GIS, and the tools between
I'm Jason Jorgenson — an archaeologist whose work sits between the trowel and the terminal. The shape of most of my research is the same as the shape of this site: take something field-bound and old, build the tooling that lets you ask new questions of it. The thesis behind Landuse Analyst is one example — modelling the agricultural catchment of an Early Bronze Age settlement on the Jordan side of the Rift Valley (Tell esh-Shuna North), using a walking-cost surface from Tobler's 1993 hiking function plus a binary-search threshold sweep over per-crop suitability rasters. The QGIS plugin came first; the web port is more recent. The geography that keeps drawing me back is the southern Levant — Jordan, Israel, the western edge of the Fertile Crescent — during the long stretch when the first towns were inventing themselves and figuring out where to put their fields.
Most working days now are spent on the toolmaking half of that equation: writing simulation code, building maps that explain themselves, and trying to keep research software durable enough to outlast a paper. The fun, when it comes, is in compressing a body of fieldwork down to something a researcher elsewhere can load + run without three months of setup.
Projects
Landuse Analyst
a workbook of agricultural catchments
Pure-Python port of my QGIS plugin for modelling the catchment of an ancient settlement. Web app + interactive map + crop / animal catalogue. Built on FastAPI, Astro, MapLibre, and the same field-notebook aesthetic you're reading now.
la.arkygeek.com →DataRanking
a quality grader for research datasets
Web port of the Kersebaum et al. 2015 framework for classifying datasets used to calibrate agro-ecosystem models — drop in a dataset, get a Platinum/Gold/Silver/Copper tier. Pinned byte-for-byte to the original C++ tool by a regression test. (I'm a co-author on the 2015 paper.)
dataranking.arkygeek.com →Agricultural Model Adapter
a model-suitability & translation toolbelt
In-browser simulation toolbelt (A MAD Toolbelt) for cross-disciplinary crop, livestock, and farm-economic models. Evaluates input requirements, flags validation warnings, and generates DSSAT and APSIM configuration files.
mad.arkygeek.com →PFP Works
software & sustainable food ventures
The banner my current work lives under — building software platforms and sustainable food-production ventures, including Prairie Fresh Produce (aquaponics) and Prairieline (a multi-tenant retail platform).
pfpworks.ca →Three months in the Levant
field notes from a 2006 CBRL trip
A debriefing from a research stay at the Council for British Research in the Levant. Site visits across Jordan and Israel, the people you meet when you're the new kid in Amman, and the slow business of figuring out which questions actually need a shovel.
/jordan →Source code
arkygeek on GitHub
The QGIS plugin, the web port, miscellaneous archaeological scripts, and the occasional 3D-printing detour. Most repos are research-grade rather than product-grade — read with that in mind.
github.com/arkygeek →More
Work — a closer look at the two platforms and how they're built. · Research — the PhD, the publications, and the questions behind the tools. · CV — the short version of all of it. · Jordan — field notes.
Get in touch
I'm currently open to new roles — research, research software engineering, or geospatial / data work — and happy with remote. Email is the right channel — jjorgenson@gmail.com. I'm also reachable through the collaborators page on the Landuse Analyst site if you have a settlement of your own you'd like to model.