IOSA.it Open Archaeology

Many excellent case studies exist of the application of geospatial technologies in the archaeological and historical domains, and particular aspects of the subject have been examined in cross-regional and cross-methodological ways. These have been stimulated by - and stimulate - rapid technological change, and a deeper embedding of that technology in research, as scholars from across the humanities become progressively more aware of the immense enabling power afforded by approaching, managing and analyzing their resources geospatially. As this agenda moves beyond the traditional ’magic circle‘ of so-called ’Spatially Aware Professionals‘ to production-level services and methods in the wider humanities communities, we feel that the time has come for a domain-wide overview of the methodologies, and how they relate to one another.

(through Open Access News and Jo Cook's blog):

Wessex Archaeology have just announced that they will be using a Creative Commons license for the 600+ photos that they have on Flickr and in their gallery.

Let’s hope that other heritage organisations follow suit. The “All Rights Reserved” copyright model is very restrictive when you study and record the past, and want to share some of that work with others to aid and encourage further learning.

By adopting the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0″ license, they are actively saying to people “we want you to use our photos”. Which for a heritage organisation, is fairly novel!

(through stoa.org) : an interesting session to discuss theoretical and methodological issues in archaeological computing.

A Call for Proposals from Geoff Carver (seen on Antiquist). Send abstracts or suggestions to gjcarver@t-online.de.

I still need a few abstracts for a session I’ve organised for the European Association of Archaeologists conference, to be held in Zadar, Croatia in September; I’ve included my session abstract, and if you have any more questions, let me know.

Is Invention the Mother of Necessity?

Sometimes it seems like all the recent developments in computer applications for archaeology are technology-driven: increasingly realistic graphics, higher resolution cameras and scanners, new uses for existing software, etc.

Last week I was looking at some slides from a lecture here at university. One slide caught my attention more than others, it was a map with some pie charts representing the distribution of different vegetal species in quadrats of an archaeological sites. Quite common and ordinary stuff in publications, indeed.

The first question rising to my mind was: how do I do this in GRASS?. It turned out that there wasn't a module to automagically count the number of points within an area, and generate a report that keeps also information about the distribution of different classes. The chart stuff is already available since GRASS 6.0 and before, but I needed a module that could generate data from which I could plot charts.

Pleiades is an international research community, devoted to the study of ancient geography, organized by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S.A. The Pleiades project is open and aims at bringing together a global community of scholars, students and enthusiasts.

Their about page says:

The Pleiades web portal is being built atop the open-source Plone Content Management System, with the addition of a number of plugin components (Plone "Products"). All modifications and special-purpose plugins developed by the Pleiades Community will be released to the public for free re-use under compatible, open-source licensing.

It's encouraging to see that such a large project benefits from free software and, at the same time, gives back to the community.

MAGIS is an inventory of regional archaeological survey projects in the greater Mediterranean region. The website features a spatial search engine, a database search, and data entry interface for registered scholars.

What's special about MAGIS is that its whole infrastructure is based on free software:

After the 2nd edition of the Italian Workshop "Open Source, Free
Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologica" [1], which
was held in Genova on May 11th, 2007, I'd like to point out some key
ideas that emerged mostly during the final discussion.

The workshop was not an outstanding success as the first one, but all
the talks presented were very interesting and showed a number of
advances since last year. We can really say that all these projects did
take one step further, as it was asked they should do in Grosseto.

I was glad we had invited to speak Andrea Glorioso from Politecnico di
Torino. His talk about Creative Commons, Science Commons and
copyright/diritto d'autore was illuminating in many parts and his
contribution to the final discussion has been substantial.