Robert J Legg

Department of Geography, Trinity College

Environmental influences on the distribution of ring forts in Ireland

Over the past two decades, archaeologists and cultural resource managers have undertaken predictive modelling as a non-destructive means to identify the likely occurrence of locating an archaeological site in a specific land parcel. These methods are also useful to identify the kind of natural environments which influenced a particular group's pattern of settlement. Here an environmental modelling technique is applied to modelling the location of ringforts (or raths) in Ireland. †In the Inny River drainage catchment, locational information on these agricultural habitations, together with corresponding environmental variables, were assembled in a Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial database. † In the Inny River catchment, ringfort locations were found to cluster on moderately fertile, well-drained soils on gently sloping land (slopes of 4-9%) between 80 and 150m above mean sea level (amsl). †The results were extended to two topographically different areas outside the Inny River catchment (Blackwater valley and Lough Ramor catchment) in the form of a probability surface. †The model predicts relatively low densities of ringforts in the Blackwater valley and much higher probabilities of occurrence in the Lough Ramor catchment. †These predicted settlement patterns are largely in agreement with actual location of sites in the testing areas and provide results that demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses when using these modelling techniques in an Irish context.

Alistair Carty

Archaeoptics Ltd.

Research?

The field of 3D data acquisition, typically through the use of close-range, terrestrial and LiDAR laser range-finding systems, is a hot topic in archaeology. Due to their capabilities in acquiring vast quantities of highly-accurate 3D data, these technologies are facing massively increasing usage, typically within academia, on archaeological sites.

This short paper looks at this phenomenon from the viewpoint of a commercial scanning bureau specialising in archaeological recording using 3D laser scanners, in terms of both the harsh realities of using these devices in often extreme environmental conditions and in the research required to produce useful deliverables from the datasets.

To complete the paper, a short round-up of "research" topics will be discussed.

T. Rowan McLaughlin

School of Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queenís University Belfast

Palaeodiet on the cusp: engaging dental microwear data using R and SQL

Dental microwear analysis (DMA) offers insight into aspects of an individualís diet. Essentially, it aims to resolve the texture of foods processed in the mouth and complement other palaeodietary proxies. As a technique, it has applications in archaeology, archaeozoology, physical anthropology, evolutionary biology, palaeontology, palaeoecology and even modern dentistry. DMA involves visualising microscopic wear features on human and animal teeth using a scanning electron microscope and analysing the size, shape and orientation of these features. The nature of DMA derived data has been under-investigated to date, as most studies rely on testing descriptive statistics of each field of microwear features without interrogating what each microwear variable means in palaeodietary terms nor what the parameters of each variableís distribution are. However, addressing these problems is made difficult by the quantity of unwieldy data that is typically generated by DMA.

Described is software that addresses this problem, developed in R (an open-source environment for statistics and graphics) and MySQL (a relational database server). Microwear features are digitised and these datasets may be visualised, manipulated and tested using a number of functions written in R, with no manipulation of the raw data required from the user. These functions also query a relational database hosted by MySQL that contains tables relating to the sites, individuals, teeth and photomicrographs used in the study. The usefulness of this approach is illustrated using examples drawn from a DMA study of a number of sites in Mesolithic and Neolithic Europe.

Stephen D. Stead

Paveprime

The CIDOC CRM

Jenny Mitcham

Archaeology Data Service, York

Somewhere between Black and White - Grey literature and the OASIS project

As the quantity of developer-led archaeological fieldwork in England increases it is difficult for researchers to keep abreast of the latest discoveries. English Heritage's Excavation Index has, since 1978, catalogued all archaeological interventions in the country and is available as an online searchable resource through the Archaeology Data Service. However, the Excavation Index takes much time and effort to collate so there is often a significant time delay between completion of the fieldwork, and the information being made available publicly.

While the Excavation Index records archaeological interventions, it also serves as an index to unpublished excavation reports (or grey literature). Few copies of these reports are produced and they are rarely disseminated beyond the local/regional Historic Environment Records and the National Monuments Record where they are not always easily accessible to the researcher. In this highly technological age, where internet access is the norm and archaeological units produce their excavation reports in digital form it seems logical to widen access to these valuable but under-used resources by disseminating them on-line.

The OASIS project (Online Access to the Index of Archaeological Investigations), launched in April 2004, provides an online tool for; creating an index of archaeological investigations as they occur; informing planning authorities, local and national archives of the progress of archaeological fieldwork; as well as providing a digital storage area for the upload of related excavation reports. This paper will demonstrate how OASIS data is being used to create a searchable catalogue of grey literature reports which is freely available to all.

I. Trinks (1), M. DÃŒaz-Andreu (2), R. Hobbs (1), A. Blanshard (2), K. Sharpe (2)

(1) Department of Earth Sciences, University of Durham (2) Department of Archaeology, University of Durham

Visualising archaeological rock art using 3D laser scanner data

3D laser scanning permits the fast and non-invasive creation of digital models of rock surfaces with sub-millimetre accuracy. Virtual 3D models offer great advantages over rock art recordings produced by traditional methods such as rubbing, tracing and photography. The application of 3D data processing algorithms permits an objective visualisation of artificial structures on the rock surface and hence allows an enhanced detailed analysis of motifs. In this paper we present several spatial data processing and visualisation algorithms that may be used to render the virtual rock surface according to physical properties, such as relative and absolute elevation and maximum curvature. Example models created using data from rock art sites on Rombalds Moor (West Yorkshire), at Lordenshaws (Northumberland) and at Long Meg (Cumbria) are used to illustrate the methods. The results are compared with recordings created using traditional methods. 3D laser scans of these sites were undertaken during projects funded by The British Academy and The Arts and Humanities Research Board during 2003-2004.

Kate Davison, Pavel Dolukhanov, Graeme Sarson and Anvar Shukurov

University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Spatial Modelling of Neolithic Dispersal in a Non-Uniform Environment

The spread of Neolithic in Europe is usually viewed either as human migration or cultural diffusion or a combination of both. We model the dispersal of the Neolithic from a localized area in the Near East, by solving the two-dimensional reaction-diffusion equation on a spherical surface, with allowance for advective transport along major rivers and coastlines. The model allows for the spatial variation in both the human mobility (diffusivity) and the carrying capacity of landscapes, reflecting the local altitude and latitude. This approach can easily be generalised to include other environmental factors, such as the bio-productivity of landscapes.

Advection-like terms arise where the random walk processes behind the reaction-diffusion model are anisotropic, as is to be expected near major rivers and coastlines. We show that such effects can contribute significantly to the accelerated spread of the LBK Neolithic along the 'Danube-Rhine Corridor', as well as the spread of the Impressed Ware ceramics along the Mediterranean coast.

In addition to allowing for the regional variations in the spread of the Neolithic consistent with the radiocarbon dated data, our model successfully reproduces a time delay in the spread of farming to the Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.

Upon straightforward modification of parameters, the model is equally applicable to both the farmers' migration and the diffusion of cultural and technological novelties among the local hunter-gatherers.

Elizabeth de Gaetano

Oxford Archaeology

The analysis of movement through space using two and three-dimensional techniques: A case study from Southern Spain

The studies of how people perceived and interacted with their surrounding landscape in the past aims to understand how people shaped and were shaped by, the worlds in which they lived and is inevitably linked to how they were able to move and what they were able to see.

One of the most influential theories related to movement and the relationship between spaces is that by Hillier and Hanson known as ëAccess Analysisí. This work has been further augmented by more recent developments in spatial theory which now include ideas related to viewpoints, viewsheds or ëisovistsí. Although these methodologies have been successfully applied to numerous archaeological examples, they have been subject to various criticisms by those who look less at the material aspects of culture and favour a more phenomenological perspective.

The aim of this paper is to briefly describe both theoretical approaches and to examine the roles that the technologies of GIS and 3D play when applied to two very distinct methods of analysis and interpretation. At the centre of the study undertaken was the Roman Urban town of Italica.

Following the work carried out on the site, it can be argued that the combination of both two and three-dimensional representations to answer questions as to how people viewed and moved within their immediate surroundings, is an interesting exercise. The combined application of scientific methodologies together with the more meaningful aspects of archaeological investigation may prove to be a compromise that will yield interesting results enabling us further to understand and construct how people shaped and were shaped by, the worlds in which they lived.

Vincent Gaffney

Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, University of Birmingham

Remote Sensing and the HP Visual and Spatial Technology Centre at Birmingham (UK)

The HP Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (HP VISTA) at the University of Birmingham (UK) was established in March 2003. The Centre is equipped to international standards in order to undertake large scale remote sensing and visualisation projects with special emphasis on remote sensing and high definition survey. This paper will introduce the archaeological computing division of HP VISTA and describe some of the projects undertaken during the first year of the Centre's operation. These will include high definition survey projects undertaken in Britain (including industrial sites at Ironbridge in Shropshire and on Catholme ritual complex in Staffordshire) and Italy (on the Roman municipium of Forum Novum in the Sabina) as well as the Centre's major project aimed at mapping the inundated Mesolithic land surfaces of the southern North Sea.

Vasiliki Ivrou (1) and Ioannis-Aristotelis Kotopoulos (2)

(1) Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow (2) Electronics & Computer Engineering Department, Technical University of Crete

Towards a Common Approach for Describing Archaeological Data

The history and nature of archaeological research is characterized by the large amount of data resulting from the research procedure itself. The storing and use of these data is always critical, and their availability is decisive for any further researches. Today the systematic use of databases for such purposes is not at the level that would allow knowledge sharing. The different database schemas and the heterogeneous nature of the data is always the problem.

In this paper we present a first approach to define a metamodel sufficient to support the storing of archaeological data. The use of a common metamodel is the only way to reach a point where data will be in a form easy to manipulate and share. This will also allow developers to easily build applications that will be able to ìunderstandî all this information for storing, transforming and querying. Such a metamodel must be general enough to cover the different needs of archaeologists and yet focused on the nature of archaeological data.

In the current paper we present the metamodel and depict its use through the instantiation of it for the case of a survey on coastal prehistoric sites in the southern Peloponnese and western Crete. We are using this survey and the collected data as a case study in order to show the completeness and flexibility of the metamodel. Finally we focus on the methodology followed throughout the procedure of collecting the data, creating a model instance to describe them and finally a database, based on the model, to store them.

Martin White, Panagiotis Petridis, Maria Sifniotis

University of Sussex

ARCO - Augmented Representation for Cultural Objects

ARCO is a prototype system for artefacts digitisation, cataloguing and visualisation. ARCO was used to build a virtual museum of Fishbourne Roman Palace which displayed several artefacts recovered from the site. Additionally, the presentation is built in such a way †that the virtual museum tells the story of the Palace from archaeological information and remains. We alsodemonstrate an interactive, intuitive way of learning about archaeological artefacts through an Augmented Reality interface. Through quiz-style scenarios the user can interact with virtual artefacts and discover more about their nature.

Ulla Rajala

University of Cambridge

Digging digitally tombs - pros and cons of digital documentation at Crustumerium (Rome, Italy)

The Remembering the dead project carried out its first excavations in the Archaic cemetery area of Cisterna Grande at Crustumerium (Rome, Italy) in July 2004. The project aims at studying burial rites and funerary representations using digital methods as an aid in the research process. This paper presents the computing strategy of the project and discusses the improvements suggested for the future work.

Peter Longhurst, Tertia Barnett and Alan Chalmers

University of Bristol

Recent Laser Scanning work in South Africa and Libya

We present the use of laser scanning for two recent projects; San cave paintings in the Cedarburg region of South Africa, and prehistoric and historic engravings recorded as part of the Fezzan Archaeology Project in Southern Libya. In South Africa recordings were made to study the effect of natural light on the artwork. In Libya the aims were twofold.

Primarily the aim was to collect data from a cross section of sites from periods, including earliest prehistoric to recent tifinagh. A second aim was to scan a number of sites that are badly damaged and represent conservation issues. These can potentially be revisited in future years to compare data and test how the sites have deteriorated. We discuss these two projects and present some preliminary results.

Maria Sifniotis and Martin White

University of Sussex

Uncertainty in archaeological reconstructions: A 3D gaming approach

3D reconstructions of archaeological remains rarely portray the assumptions made when creating the three-dimensional model. The interpretation of archaeology involves a large degree of uncertainty and, as such, hypotheses have different certainty levels. We believe that uncertainty can, and should, be portrayed in archaeological reconstructions. We propose the use of a gaming engine as a basis for such a representation. This paper presents a novel idea of adapting a gaming engine to an archaeological perspective. In that way, archaeological scenarios can be enhanced with the real-time interactivity offered by a gaming environment. †This also implies multiple user interaction, varied styles of information gathering and sharing as well as varied ways of representing the ambiguity of reconstructed objects.

Paul Cripps

University of Southampton

Archaeological tower blocksí ñ computational and theoretical ghettos

Archaeological computing can now be seen as an integral part of the archaeological process, being used routinely on a variety of archaeological projects. Indeed, it is becoming rare to see a project design that does not include even a token reference to GIS, databases or a website. Innovative applications of archaeological computing are facilitated by specialist conferences aimed at the archaeological computing community, such as CAA and VAST, while conferences such as TAG no longer engage with archaeological computing, instead catering solely for archaeological theorists. This paper proposes that the result of this is a broadening of the divide between archaeological theory and computational theory as related to archaeology. Archaeological computing practitioners are becoming more specialised, dealing with the latest generation of technological advances such as XML, the semantic web, and three-dimensional data capture and visualisation, with many necessarily coming from computer science, having limited archaeological experience despite a wealth of computing experience. At the same time, databases, GIS and web technologies have become tools of the archaeological masses rather than the preserve of specialists. As such, we have a position where archaeological theorists can be said to view archaeological computing as atheoretical, something purely practical which can be done with basic technological training, while at the same time computer scientists are increasingly getting involved with archaeological computing to showcase their technological advances in a publicly popular domain without reference to broader theoretical corpora. Both groups have active communities which have their own sub-communities, but there is a real danger of these communities becoming ghettos due to their lack of engagement with each other. This is especially so with the foundation of virtual communities, where often the foundation of the community is itís own raison díetre. The communities which we are building may well befall the same fate as the modernist tower-blocks of the 1950s and 60s; all bright and shiny to begin with, but quickly becoming slums in which no-one wants to live. This paper does not propose a solution to this complex issue, but rather hopes to provoke discussion on some of the issues involved.

Kristian D. Strutt

Archaeological Prospection Services of Southampton

Using Conventional Geophysical Survey Techniques in an Urban Context: Survey at the Plaza de la EncarnaciÛn, Seville

This paper focuses on the results of a resistivity survey that was undertaken at the Plaza de la EncarnaciÛn in the centre of Seville, Spain, in the Spring of 2003. In order to assess the application of multiplexed resistance survey in relation to complex archaeological stratigraphy in an urban context, a survey was conducted in the immediate vicinity of excavations of the Imperial Roman and Late Antique deposits located in the Plaza. The results of the investigation hint at the complexity of the buried archaeological deposits around the excavation, and present implications both for the application of such techniques in an urban context, and their use for heritage management on large-scale excavations.

Amy Smith (1), Brian Fuchs (2) and Leif Isaksen (1)

(1) University of Reading, UK (2) Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives (VLMA)

The Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading (http://www.reading.ac.uk/ure) is developing a Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives (VLMA), an RDF-driven visual collections aggregator/syndicator applet that allows viewing, collecting, and reusing distributed visual archives and relevant metadata via P2P technology. It is funded in 2004-2005 by JISC and is a joint project with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de).

The VLMA is a response to specific practical problems in content integration and reuse encountered in digitizing and publishing the Ure Museum's collections and in adding them to the ECHO humanities portal (http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). As a small collection where an object-type is normally represented by a single example, if at all, the Ure Museum is crucially dependent, for both teaching and research, on comparisons of its holdings to those in other museums and archives. Online resources could provide much of the requisite comparanda, yet differences in presentation from site to site severely limit this potential, as does the well-known difficulty of maintaining references to off-site data. To address this problem, the VLMA has developed a "portlet" approach, in which collections with intrinsically heterogeneous metadata sets are syndicated and their contents "collected"--browsed, stored, viewed, and reused--at the peer/client level on an object-by-object basis. This allows metadata integration to be performed at the point of reuse, by the end user, an approach which complements more traditional ones such as common metadata structure (CDWA) or metadata aggregates (OAI). Content reuse can take several forms ranging from a presentation to resyndication of collected objects in the form of a new collection. The latter possibility provides an easy method for bringing added value to published content as well as a simple way of creating thematically related collections with distributed content.

The VLMA employs a simple method for content syndication. A content provider seeds the network by syndicating already published content using a syndication tool, which writes RDF to a lightbox namespace, consisting of services, collection objects, images, and metadata. The two services currently implemented are searching and browsing. In the collection browser service, a user browses online objects in a discrete collection, which he then captures to the lightbox. The lightbox then displays the images and metadata sets associated with this object, and syndicates them as a local collection, which appears in the applet's service hierarchy alongside other collections that have been discovered on the network. In the search service, a user can use a search mask built from a collection's metadata schema to search collection metadata and collect objects. The client then has several reuse options. The applet currently allows local export to Open Office Impress and to xml. Annotation and visual comparison options will be added soon.

The VLMA applet is open-source and written in Java under a GPL. The current release is available from the project's website (http://vlma.sourceforge.org) as well as from the Ure Museum's website (http://www.reading.ac.uk/Ure/VLMA).

Thomas A. Goskar

Wessex Archaeology

Visualising 3D Laser Scans

One of the challenges we face when dealing with 3D laser scan data is how to interpret it through visualisation. Point clouds are useful to an extent, but can be confusing and sometimes inappropriate for looking at more ephemeral features. This paper presents some novel approaches to visualising this data using surfaced scan data.

Matthew Addis

IT Innovation Centre

Creating, searching and navigating multimedia collections in cultural heritage

Paul Cripps

English Heritage

Visibility analysis in the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site

Visibility analysis has been used to assess the visual characteristics of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site since the WHS GIS was set up in the nineteen-nineties, primarily being used to support planning applications in a management context. This paper describes an application of fuzzy techniques in a research context to develop updated versions of the visual sensitivity maps used in the management of the WHS, in which the previous cumulative viewshed analysis (Batchelor, 1997) was repeated at a higher resolution using a fuzzy viewshed function for 13 key sites in the Stonehenge study area and 6 in the Avebury study area. Combined with the addition of a number of new datasets over the past few years, the WHS GIS now offers increased potential for archaeological investigation in addition to its function as a management tool.

Peter Rauxloh

Museum of London

Interrogating a Medieval Cemetery: GIS aids to interpretation

This presentation will discuss the various ways in which the post-excavation analysis of the largest archaeologically excavated Medieval cemetery in Europe from which some 10,7516 individuals have been recovered, is being helped through the creation of various GIS products. Moreover it looks at how those same products have been united with stratigraphic and interpretative phasing data within RDBMS, and processed to provide novel ways of visualising the buried population and the stratgrraphic ties between them in both 2 and 3 dimensions.

Eleftheria Paliou

University of Southampton

Virtual views of the West House

The ìVirtual Views of the West Houseî is an on-line interactive resource for archaeological research. It presents the virtual reconstruction of four rooms of the West House, a prehistoric building that was discovered in Thera (Santorini, Greece). The reconstruction was created so as to be a useful research resource for archaeologists that are interested in the study of Bronze Age mural painting and architecture. For this reason QTVR movies of the model were embedded in a web environment and were linked with additional information with the aim of enhancing understanding of the reconstruction images. Special attention was given to finding a means to satisfy the demands of archaeologists to examine the primary material on which the reconstruction was based, to know how the model was created and the interpretive leaps that had to be taken during the design process.

Phil Flack

University of East Anglia

Rapid Urban Modelling with Multilingual Avatars

Project contributors: University of East Anglia; Braunschweig Technical University, Germany; University of Brighton

Cities and towns around the world have a huge wealth of historically significant and culturally important material in the form of buildings and events. We are creating a toolkit of applications specifically to enable this information to be recreated as virtual reality worlds for visitors to see for themselves how buildings once looked; to hear from virtual guides the history of significant buildings and events; to explore locations unavailable to them.

A typical city scene might consist of a small (500m 2) region with important buildings and a much larger surrounding region of generic housing. By providing tools to rapidly create these generic buildings and automatically position them along roads, a large proportion of the scene can be constructed in a relatively short time. A scene will also need important buildings (modelled using traditional modelling packages) and parametric trees to add realism and movement. Once the background has been created a number of people can be added around the scene. These avatars can talk to the visitor and will be combined with a background crowd of city residents so that the model comes to life with an interactive information guide.

Russell Gant

Wessex Archaeology

Real world use of XML, XSLT and Web Services in Archaeology

Archaeology produces an increasing amount of data but is it retrievable and how easily is it shared? This paper will highlight the work being carried out at Wessex Archaeology to utilize technologies such as XML and XSLT to aid the flow of data throughout the organization and make it available to a wider public.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a way of storing data in a "self-describing" way. XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) can be used to transform XML documents into a variety of different formats (for example: different XML structures, HTML, PDF's and text files). Web Services provide a means to supply XML data to online applications that then apply XSLT documents against them.

Examples of our work in this area will include the Warrior Information System that serves to provide information on previous Wessex investigations. The data is streamed out of a relational database in XML and transformed via XSLT into HTML, tab delimited and FISH XML formats for display, download and dissemination. The FISH XML format is especially important as a means of interchanging data with other organizations also utilizing this standard.

Finally, the possibilities of using XSLT to transform survey data into SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics - another incarnation of XML) will be explored.