Geographic Information Systems: Modeling and Analytical Shortcomings with a Landscape Archaeological Case Study
- Introduction
- Commercial GIS shortfalls
- Temporal GIS
- 3-D GIS
- Case Study: Landscape archaeology in the Granikos River Valley
- Research motivation
- Research goals
- Research questions
- Research approach
- Surveying concerns
- Data adjustments
- A comparison of total station and GPS data
- DEM generation
- Viewshed analyses
- Buffer analysis
- Future research
- Ground penetrating radar
- Excavation
- Object oriented GIS
- References
Archaeology has traditionally been defined relative to anthropology as ?anthropology of the past? but an alternative viewpoint defines archaeology as ?geography of the past.? As with other geographically-based fields, archaeological research emphasizes spatial information, uses a highly visual approach to analysis and communication, incorporates a thematic structure in the identification of objects and geographic phenomena, and is built on the foundation of an environmental database, often in the form of a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) or a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) (Gillings & Mattingly, 1999). GIS provides the means to simultaneously integrate multiple layers of spatial information for an interpretation of the historic landscape based on observations of the modern landscape (Wescott, 2000). With archaeological dating, a specific timeframe can then be established in which to place this data (Dark, 1995).
Keywords: Granikos River Valley