IOSA.it Open Archaeology

PerryGeo has an interesting post on his blog about using the GRASS i.* modules to find impervious surfaces. I have no experience in archaeological remote sensing (even tough here at my department there's a great lab), but this tutorial should be useful for those who have large survey regions to cover and want to find possible settlement sites, given that even a small village needs a few “usable” acres.

If you have good resolution aerial images of your study region, you might want to try this.

Today I have added a new tutorial in the Spatial analysis section of the Quantitative Archaeology Wiki.
Using GRASS, a simple method is shown for performing a basic exploratory analysis on the relationship between settlement sites and landscape variables like elevation and aspect. Further updates to the tutorial will include more screenshots and advanced quantitative analysis.
The tutorial is available at http://wiki.iosa.it/dokuwiki/spatial_analysis:settlements_and_landscape.

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.

We are happy to announce that a new stable version of GRASS GIS has been released today. This release adds hundreds of new features, support for the latest GIS data formats, and includes new translations for many languages. The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) combining powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines into a single integrated software suite. GRASS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. It runs on a variety of popular hardware platforms and is Free open-source software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

GRASS is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. GRASS WIKI offers the official community platform of the GRASS GIS project. On GRASS WIKI, you can get and contribute to GRASS related information, documents and add-ons programs.