archaeological practice aiming at systematically recording archaeological sites and elements that are still perceptible on the terrain, under the form of still visible structural remains, earthworks or scattered artifacts. Survey is a fundamental investigative method of Landscape Archaeology, aiming to collect data about ancient settlement distribution and to locate unknown archaeological sites and features without recourse to excavation. Given the usual extension of the area to cover, only few sectors of it could be sampled or selected by means of random choice or a complex statistical analysis.
Published in Chapter:
GIS Use in Landscape Archaeology
Cristina Corsi (Università di Cassino, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-845-1.ch045
Abstract
Information technologies (ITs) entered and irreversibly changed the discipline of archaeology during the last 20 years of the second millennium. The first experiments involved databases and alphanumeric data processing, then in the late 1980s GPS technologies, associated with spatial data processing, were first tested to locate archaeological objects in the geographical space. Computer-aided design (CAD) software has progressively replaced the traditional procedures of topographical and architectural design, while “New Archaeology” and “Processual Archaeology” focusing their attention on the quantitative aspects of phenomena (Binford, 1989; Binford & Binford, 1968; Clarke, 1968; Clarke, 1977) adopted “spatial technologies”, consisting of computer-based applications concerned with the acquisition, storage and manipulation of spatial information (Wheatley & Gillings, 2002).