November marks the successful completion of Program Increment 01 (Foundations), during which we established the core technical and organisational infrastructure of the ESTER project. Over the past weeks, we set up the full GitHub organisation, created the major repositories for data collection, modelling, the API, and visualisation, and implemented a coherent workflow with milestones, epics, and sprint-based planning.
We also finalised the onboarding of our first postdoctoral researcher and completed the initial setup of our collaboration environment, including the shared Nextcloud calendar, internal communication channels, and a DataVerse structured for future datasets. As an initial example, our test dataset is now available in the DataVerse (the excellent 14C compilation by Manning et al.). With these elements in place, the project now runs on a stable foundation with version-controlled data, documented metadata standards, and tested software environments.
With PI-01 completed, we now move into PI-02 (Harvest), which focuses on gathering, structuring, and integrating archaeological datasets from across Europe as the empirical basis for our upcoming population modelling work.
The ESTER team is fully operational and prepared for the next phase.