IOSA.it Open Archaeology

Last week I was in Milan for a workshop about the study of pottery from Gortyna, Crete, among all Italian universities working there (flyer and programme here).

Ten days ago Luca Mandolesi released his pyArchInit QGIS plugin.
pyArchInit is a free/open source tool for the management of excavation data (compatible with Italian ICCD standard record sheets), that integrates itself inside the QGIS environment and gives you a highly portable system designed by an archaeologist for his daily work in rescue excavations.
pyArchInit was presented at the last workshop on archaeology and free/open source software in Rome, you can see Luca's presentation here.

You might have noticed a lack of updates here at iosa.it, and the cause is simple: I was again on the field doing the second excavation campaign of this year.

I spent 5 weeks in Vignale (Piombino - LI), near Populonia for those who know this more famous Roman site. Our excavation investigates a Roman villa/mansio which lives from the 1st BC century to at least 5th AD.

Among the most interesting things I have been doing while digging are:

• developing Total Open Station, which is now fully functional on GNU/Linux systems (Windows and Mac OS X testing still to come)
• investigating interpolation algorithms for creating a DEM of the pre-Roman palaeosoil at the site
• acting as protagonist in a 5-minute short film set in our excavation (could be uploaded to Youtube in the future)

After 8 months of silence about this interesting topic, at last I've found some time to put online the small draft application I have been writing to demonstrate how to automate the use of Graphviz to generate Harris matrix diagrams for your excavation (or anything else you can study by stratigraphy). The code can be retrieved at http://bitbucket.org/steko/harris/ and there you'll be able to get also future updates.

The application is far from complete and has no GUI yet, but at least it shows the model I have developed from the first examples, where all steps were to be performed “by hand”.

From the theory of E. C. Harris, we all know that all stratigraphic relations are bound to what I called an ABC model:

• A fter
• B efore
• C ontemporary

Tomorrow I'm leaving Italy. In 2 days I'll be in Gortina, Crete, for the 2008 campaign in the Byzantine Quarter at Gortina with the University of Siena and the Italian Archaeological School under the direction of Enrico Zanini.
Many things have changed since last year: some old friends are staying at home (Laura, Giulia, Elena, Francesco), but we have some young students that come to Gortina for the first time. We are less than last year, but the excavation area should be also smaller, so the overall result will be hopefully as good.

On most excavations the large number of stratigraphic units and contexts makes it necessary to use some sort of representation of the relative chronological sequence to keep track of what has already been excavated (not to mention building archaeology). This tool is the Harris Matrix.

It can be defined as a directed graph from the most recent down to the older deposits, where the nodes represent layers, that are connected through stratigraphic relations (edges).
This year in Gortyna I tried to use the Graphviz software for automating the creation of the Harris Matrix for the excavation area I was in.

UPDATE: I've published a first draft of a simple application to automate the generation of the Harris Matrix. Read more here.