GIS in Archaeology

Since its origins in the 19th century, the modern discipline of archaeology has been based on an understanding of spatial phenomena at a range of interconnecting scales. Whether plotting distributions of artifacts and structures across a site or sites within a landscape, spatial relationships have been fundamental to thinking about past human lives and about social structures and relationships. Archaeology has also had a long and fruitful relationship with geography through the exchange of [Page 1295]methods, techniques, and theoretical approaches; and it is not surprising, therefore, that geographic information system (GIS) technology was rapidly adopted by archaeology and has formed the basis of much analysis since the early 1990s.

The use of GIS in archaeology can be broadly divided into the two areas of cultural resource ...