IOSA.it Open Archaeology

As many readers will know, since 2008 we’ve been working to enable archaeologists and their colleagues with a chance to do professional surveying on free operating systems. What sounded like a silly idea is now reality in the Total Open Station project.

Total stations do a nice job, but that’s you do something more when you’re interested in what’s beneath the soil rather than on top of it. Enter geophysics, with another load of costly hardware tools that are locked in proprietary combinations of software and drivers.

In case you’re using GNU/Linux or another free operating system, you might find quite difficult to interact with your geophysical device, without any dedicated software. As you might expect, you’re not the first to encounter this problem (you’re never going to be the first) and someone else already started working on a solution.

Tractatus Post Quem (tpq) by John Donovan is a

collection of tools useful to the archaeological geophysicist and surveyor, focussing on the conversion of data from proprietary formats, georeferencing them, and tagging with metadata.

There is a great conference in Turin in 11 days: COMMUNIA Conference “University and CyberSpace”. The list of speakers is just amazing, if you would like to talk about open archaeology and cultural heritage in general, please come and find me.

Since the 19th century, the study of archaeobotanical remains has been very important for combining “strict” archaeological knowledge with environmental data. Pollen data enable assessing the introduction of certain domesticated species of plants, or the presence of other species that grow typically where humans dwell. Not all pollen data come from archaeological fieldwork, but the relationship among the two sets is strong enough to take an interested look at pollen data worldwide, their availability and most importantly their openness, for which we follow the Open Knowledge Definition.

The starting point for finding pollen data is the NOAA website.

The Global Pollen Database hosted by the NOAA is a good starting point, but apparently its coverage is quite limited outside the US.

We're unfortunately getting used to this kind of announcements about cuts for research and education bodies. Let's not get used to culture as a minor, unessential ingredient of our society.

Anche quest'anno la cultura dovrà pagare le mancate riforme strutturali del paese.
La SAIA è tra gli enti, istituti e fondazioni che non riceveranno più finanziamenti dallo Stato, decretando così la morte della ricerca archeologica italiana in Grecia, che dura da più di 100 anni, e la fine della più importante scuola di formazione archeologi italiani.

Da oltre un secolo, dapprima come spedizione scientifica di singoli studiosi, poi come Missione stabile ed, infine, nella qualità di Sede ateniese per ricerche e scavi archeologici in Grecia e nelle aree di civiltà ellenica e per la formazione e la specializzazione di giovani studiosi, la Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene è il punto di riferimento di tutti gli archeologi e gli storici dell'antichità che dalle Università, dal CNR o dalle Soprintendenze svolgono attività di ricerca in Grecia.

Nata per favorire l'alta formazione dei funzionari delle Soprintendenze archeologiche italiane (ruolo che ha svolto in passato in modo egregio e che continuerà a svolgere in futuro) e come centro di coordinamento delle Missioni italiane in Grecia (e per un certo tempo anche in Oriente) la Scuola ha costituito sin dall'inizio la sintesi tra due funzioni basilari: formazione e ricerca, ospitando anche laureati in architettura che si occupano di restauro, conservazione e studio dei monumenti.

If you can, please sign the petition to save the Italian Archaeological School at Athens.

We have finally managed to put online the video footage of the seminar "Diritti d'autore e banche dati per i Beni Culturali" that we had last year in Genoa on 7 May 2009, organized by grupporicerche.
You can read a brief report and watch videos at this URL: http://www.iosa.it/diritti/ - video files are in the open and free OGG Theora format, and hosted at the Internet Archive. It's all in Italian, we haven't managed to create subtitles yet. If you need help, don't hesitate to ask.
We really hope that this material will be useful to anyone trying to push for open archaeology. More meetings like this one will certainly help clarifying the main issues in the field of copyright assignment and dissemination of archaeological data under free licenses.