Archaeology  (Page 4/4)

e-Research methods and technologies have also played a significant role in the development of geospatial archaeology. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have long been at the forefront of computational archaeology: the large quantities of data from large-scale surveys and site-wide analysis, and the need to reference it within a broader spatial framework such as a global coordinate system, has ensured this. However, the emergence of the so-called ‘Geospatial Web’ in recent years (for a recent review see Scharl and Tochtermann 2007) has led to new ways of linking, sharing and understanding geospatial information online. The availability of high quality satellite imagery from services such as Google Earth (GE) has generated a good deal of recent interest in the archaeological community (see Ullman and Gorokhovich 2006), as have the means of marking up and describing data in such environments. In GE’s case this is Keyhole Markup Language (KML), which allows a dataset to be created in a GE view and then shared, updated and added to by another user. Although its impact on field archaeology is not likely to be great in the near future, GE and other ‘virtual earth’ platforms are undoubtedly of interest to scholars wishing to link and contextualize archaeological data online (e.g. Elliott and Gillies 2009).

Summary: improving archaeological research

Archaeology has always thrived on technological innovation. The increasingly information-rich ways of working into which the UK’s academic milieu is moving forms a backdrop for the ever-convoluted relationships between archaeologists and their data. Current e-Research technologies will not provide any panaceas: these equate with what Hodder describes (above) as ‘modern data-management systems’. They may have yet to prove that they can transfer very ‘fuzzy’ data from the ground into the highly structured and quality assured forms that appear in archaeological publications; but there seems little doubt that tools and methods such as relational databases, Natural Language Processing, cultural heritage ontologies, quantitative profiling, geospatial computing, and field-based digital data capture, form a ‘methodological commons’. Whether taken together for the discipline as a whole, or separately in individual projects or research exercises, this collective set of e-Research tools and methods can provide a type of ‘enabling support’ that is simply unprecedented for archaeologists so that they may undertake the research process in better, faster and – possibly – completely new ways.

References / further reading

Carver, M. 1985: The friendly user. In Cooper, M. A. and Richards, J. D. (eds.), Current issues in archaeological computing. British Archaeological Reports International Series 271: 47-61.

Clark, J. T. 2007: An introduction to digital discovery: Exploring new frontiers in human heritage. In Clark, J. T. and Hagemesiter, E. M. (eds.), Digital Discovery: Exploring new frontiers in human heritage. Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology: Proceedings of the 34th conference, Fargo, ND, April 2006: 11-14.

Eiteljorg, H. 2004: Computing for Archaeologists. In Schreibman, S., Siemens, R. and Unsworth, J. 2004: A Companion to Digital Humanities . Blackwell, London: 20-30.

Elliott, T. and Gilles, S. 2009: Digital geography and classics. In Changing the Center of Gravity: Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure . Special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (Winter 2009: v3 n1), Gregory Crane and Melissa Terras (eds.): (External Link) .

Hodder, I. 1997: 'Always momentary, fluid and flexible': towards a reflexive excavation methodology. Antiquity 71: 691-700.

Lock, G. 2003: Using computers in archaeology: towards virtual pasts. Routledge, Taylor and Francis, London.

Moffett, J. 1991: Computers in archaeology: approaches and applications past and present. in Ross, S., Moffett, J. and Henderson, J. (eds.), Computing for archaeologists. Oxford University Committee for Archaeology Monograph No. 18. Oxford: 13-39.

Richards, J. D. and Ryan, N. 1985: Data processing in archaeology. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology.

Scharl, A. and Tochtermann, K. (eds.), The Geospatial Web (Springer 2007).

Ullmann, L. and Gorokhovich, Y., 2006: ‘Google Earth and some practical applications for the field of archaeology’, CSA Newsletter Vol. XVIII, No. 3 (2006), published online: (External Link)

Warwick, C., Baker, M., Clarke, A., Fulford, M., Grove, M., O'Riordan, E. and Rains, M. 2009: iTrench: A study of user reactions to the use of information technology in field archaeology. Literary and Linguistic Computing 24 (2).