A design to use computational science for archaeological interpretation
Virginia Hetrick, Richard M. Leventhal, Dwight Read · ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics · 1992
Computational archaeology is the use of computational science methodologies to perform archaeological research.In ourexperience and in the work we have seen reported, the use of computers in archaeology does not begin to approach this level.In this paper, we present the design for a computational science approach to the execution of a single archaeological excavation as a prototype to accomplish four objectives: a. Document the excavation as it proceeds; b.Direct the progress of the excavation; c.Provide analytic and synthetic capabilities; and, d.Prepare materials for presentation and reporting.Additionally, because an important aspect of any prototype must be the transfer of that prototype to an operational situation, we will briefly address the issue of technology transfer and the impact that issue had on our design of the overall system.To accomplish the four objectives, we first identified the elements necessary to carry out various archaeological tasks.These are rather standard events, such as defining and recording the locations and contents of lots (i.e., of particular individual excavations identified by the staff and the contents of the various layers within each of the individual excavations), surveying the entire site to be excavated and generating maps as a result of the survey, and attempting visualization of structures found at various locations within the site.Many archaeologists are presently entering these and other kinds of information into some type of database system.Depending on the training of the archaeologist, it may be a PC-or Mac-based relational database or geographic information system (GIS) or a full-fledged workstation or mainframe GIS.In the journals we have examined, and in the conversations we have had with other archaeological teams from North America, South America, and Europe, we have not found any examples of excavations which use computational capabilities to the extent that we are using them for the Xunantunich Archaeological Project in Belize.In the remainder of this paper, we will outline the design we are implementing for the Xunantunich Project and explain how the various elements of the design fit into the archaeological objectives to be reached. Elements of the systemComputationally the design consists of six parts.These are: a. Relational database b.