QUB | Archaeology and Palaeoecology | The 14Chrono Centre

psimpoll and pscomb programs for plotting and analysis

• High quality, publishable, graphical output of 'pollen' diagrams and age-depth models;
• Wide-range of numerical techniques, including zonation, ordination, age-depth modelling, and basic statistical description;
• All input and output is plain text (and thus easily readable and modifiable);
• Portable: versions available (or can be made) on all computer operating systems known to me;
• Graphical output is PostScript, for which there is an excellent free viewer (see http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html), a wide range of printers, and which can itself be further modified in CorelDraw or converted to PDF.

Further details of both programs in the documentation (see below).

This page provides access to an ftp site from which the program can be downloaded.

Executables are being updated to take account of minor corrections. Version dates are indicated for each system. For some versions, the two programs are available as one compressed file or the two executables separately.

All program versions are executable files, and should run directly, after any unpacking, on the appropriate system.

• 4.27
  • Download compressed Windows 95/NT/later versions (psimpoll 31.07.09; pscomb 04.07.05)
  • Download psimpoll.COL: file needed to colour psimpoll diagrams.
• 4.26
  • Download Mac OS X (psimpoll 05.02.08; pscomb 04.07.05)
• Documentation
  • 4.27: online.
  • 4.26: online.

• 21.07.09: version 4.27. Allowed rotation of taxa names to be -ve (in which case they are displayed reading from left to right). Added option (menu Dm) to display taxa names on the left of the diagram, axis labels on the left, suitable for display in portrait mode.
• 05.02.08: version 4.263. Sundry minor bug fixes.
• 21.03.07: version 4.261. Added an output format for importing fields to a spreadheet. Added 'Rx' to to interactive plotting to enable scale shifts. Added use of a 'perthousand' symbol for axis labelling.
• 25.07.06: version 4.253. Sundry minor bug fixes. Problems with files that have (hidden) .txt extensions now addressed: if a file read fails, psimpoll now silently attempts to open a file with the same name plus a .txt extension. Warning printed if a configuration file (.CFG) was generated by an earlier version of psimpoll, and may thus be incompatible.
• 27.03.06: version 4.252. Sundry minor bug fixes.
• 04.07.05: version 4.25. Added local regression (loess) as a method for age-depth modelling; improved reading of files from GPD; sundry minor bug fixes.
• 15.08.03: corrected bug in psimpoll that incorrectly wrote CFG files (wrt to labels on age columns and graphs)
• 12.08.03: corrected minor bugs in both psimpoll and pscomb
• 07.11.02: corrected bug with reading of calibrated radiocarbon ages
• 15.08.02: corrected bug in CONIIC (caused crash on Windows).
• 13.08.02: version 4.10. Added new zonation method CONIIC (related to CONISS, but uses information content instead of sums of squares). Added drawing of dendrograms for both CONISS and CONIIC. Improved graph resolution for age-depth plots (no longer dependent on sample locations). Added correlation coefficients (linear, Kendall's Tau, Spearman's rank) to statistical analyses. Some improvements to error messages.
• 11.07.02: version 4.01. Minor changes fixing some minor bugs in the graphical output of AD/BC dates, and fixing a bug in the independent splitting (presence-absence splitting was not working correctly with a small proportion of taxa).
• 27.05.02: version 4.00. Major changes associated with handling calibrated radiocarbon ages, and some minor bug fixes.
• 17.12.01: corrected sundry minor bugs. Slight improvements to reading of Tilia files (see the documentation). Age-depth plots are now produced for all models, including those with portions of negative accumulation rate.
• 2.2.00 Version 3.10: Added correspondence analysis (including detrended correspondence analysis), based on Hill's original program DECORANA, with minor corrections.
• 7.12.99: corrected reading of data needed for calculation of confidence intervals for concentrations. Corrected problem with clash between sums and histograms. Added (experimental!) facility to change paper sizes (A4, A3, Letter, Legal).
• 10.6.99: corrected bug in generation of xxxxAD.ps file (caused crash on PCs when converting concs to accumulation rates).
• 8.6.99: added facility to plot with extended x-axis scale
• 18.5.99: a bug corrected in optimal zonation (caused incomplete results when the number of zones was high relative to the number of levels).

Archaeology and Palaeoecology | 42 Fitzwilliam St | Belfast BT9 6AX | Northern Ireland | tel +44 28 90 97 5136