Wiring it all together: Spatial Data Infrastructures for

archaeology

Stuart Dunn

Centre for e-ResearchKing’s College London

Spatial Data Infrastructures

- OpenLayers

- OpenStreetMap

- Google Earth/Maps

- Yahoo! Maps

- Bing Earth (Microsoft)

- GeoNames.org

- Etc etc. (see e.g. Batty et. al. Data mash-ups and the future of mapping – http://www.jisc.ac.uk/techwatch for more)

Location is a complex concept

© Copyright Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum

Reconstructions – geographic and ‘representational’

Many cultural reconstructions have a spatial element

Pitt Rivers and the establishment of ‘scientific’ archaeology

Furumark/Evans – ceramic classification system based on Helladic, Cycladic, Minoan

Google Earth [v. 4.2 (beta)]

Berkshire [v. 1.0]

Ecotricity

Asda, Lower Earley

1. Declarative - ‘Ecotricity is near the M4 motorway’

2. Procedural - ‘I can walk home from here by undertaking certain actions

3. Configurational - ‘it would be difficult for me to walk from the supermarket to Ecotricity, but less so from here to home

How are sites experienced?

Case 1: MiPP/Silchester

Case 1: MiPP/Silchester

2004-2009 – VERA project

2004-2009 – VERA project

Visualisation technologies

• Motion - capture• 3D animation• Motion - tracking

“Interpretation occurs at the trowel’s edge”

Ian Hodder

Case 2: CHALICE

• Extract information from EPNS volumes to create a gazetteer containing linking modern places to historical forms of their names.

• Where possible, link the entries to GeoNames entries to acquire grid references.

• Use the new resource to link to and between other historical resources.

Conclusions

- Most outputs of SDIs are visualizations – need to move to more analytical modes of enquiry (a la GIS)

- SDIs need to accommodate the complex and varied non-digital processes in the field/laboratory/library etc and connect these to data tools and hubs. But...

- The main challenge and main potential for archaeology is to provide hubs of linkable, interoperating data

- ...which will allow us to rethink our approaches to different kinds of evidence