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 management (CRM) and landscape archaeology. Most countries have national or regional inventories of archaeological and historical sites and monuments often integrated into development legislation and planning control. Traditionally, these records have consisted of information about archaeological sites tied to maps and so are ideally suited to GIS technology. One of the strengths of GIS is the ability to integrate and manage large amounts of diverse data, and that capacity is well demonstrated within CRM, where written information, map data, and various types of images all need to be readily available for a specific place to respond rapidly to a development threat. Another aspect of CRM, one that is particularly important in North America, is the predictive modeling of the location of archaeological sites. GIS is used to analyze the locations of known sites and produce predictive maps that indicate where sites may be found, a procedure of great value when large areas of landscape cannot be surveyed and evaluated through fieldwork. In many countries, the move toward online CRM databases is well under way, enabling easier public access.

Much archaeological work these days is conducted at the landscape scale, and an interest in landscape, often a rather vague and contentious term that can involve a range of different approaches and understandings, is something that unites today's archaeology and geography. Again, the data sets used here can be large and diverse, consisting of various surveys, including aerial photographic, geophysical, and surface walking and earthwork details, as well as environmental information and targeted excavation. GIS technology is now considered essential to correlate and manage all these georeferenced data together with the attribute data sets that link with them. Archaeology is not just about gathering data, although this is an important aspect of most archaeologists’ work, and many field-based data these days originate as digital information (“born digital”), so inputting it into a GIS is part of the process. Once collected, data have to be analyzed and presented as an interpretation of some aspect of past people's lives.

The adoption of GIS in archaeology in the early 1990s was not entirely uncontroversial and has generated considerable debate, again similar to that within geography. A popular early use of GIS was to model the “catchment” areas of archaeological sites, using buffering to try and establish their areas of economic control. Another was the modeling of site territories and hierarchies using Thiessen polygons and the principles of central place theory. Although still occasionally used, with some interesting results, these were generally criticized as being environmentally deterministic, and, so it was argued, such models were rooted in a mode of positivist interpretation that underwent severe criticism by the developing postmodernist archaeology of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The response by GIS-using archaeologists was to try and develop approaches that humanized the modeled landscape by attempting to position the analyst within it, the two most popular areas of work being visibility and movement studies.

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