Archaeological Geomatics
Anthropology 3283:30-5:45 PM Thursdays
Spring Semester 2005
Dr. Scott MadryResearch Associate Professor of Anthropology, UNC-CH Madrys@email.unc.edu http://www.informatics.org/anthromadry.html http://www.informatics.org/anth328 ~ Main page ~ Schedule ~ Web Resources ~ Bibliography ~
Introduction:
This lab will be in two parts. First, Prof. Madry will make a short(!) presentation on a recently completed Florida GIS predictive modeling project. This will consist of a .ppt presentation of a paper presented at the recent Southeast Archaeological Conference.
The goal here is to jump from the very beginnings of spatial archaeology (our discussions about Viru Valley) to the current state of the practice in the application of Goematics. Bookends, if you will.
It is very interesting, in the context of our course, that Gordon Willey conducted some of the very first archaeology in the Northwest Florida Gulf Coast, working as a young graduate student on the northwest panhandle region (my project is was in the northeast Florida coast).
You can read about his early work there here: I wonder what he would think about all this. He passed away last spring.
Part two The second part of the lab will consist of your using ArcGIS to browse through the various GIS layers of the Duval county GIS database, and to use the various ArcGIS tools that you learned in the first lab.
First: Put the CD with the data in your computer. You can run it from the CD. Next, start ArcMap and go to:
CD/Duval
Open the folder Duval_ArcGIS_Madry. This is the directory that contains the Duval database. The database contains raster, vector, and point data of Duval county. This is only a fraction of the total database, only the files that were actually used in the final analysis.
In ArcMap, go to file ->open.
Then click on the Duval_Madry.mxd. This is the GIS database. Once you clikck on this, the various layers should load, and you can look at different layers.
We will use this to learn to browse through data in ArcGIS and become familiar and comfortable with the software. We will also explore the data and see some typical problems associated with GIS data.
This may be a good database to use for a project (hint, hint).
You can keep the Duval data CD until the next lab. Please be careful, as it contains sensitive and propriatary data. At the completion of the lab, please consider the following issues:
1) what are some major differences between spatial archaeology in the 1930's and today. What has changed, what is the same. How have we progressed? Have we lost anything along the way?
"Data, data, data, he cried! I can't make bricks without clay!"-Sherlock Holmes
2) GIS feeds on data. It takes a LOT of very good data to do good geomatics analysis. We are very lucky in that I was able to simply acquire online all of the raw data required to conduct my analysis, including the site data from the Florida Master Archaeology site files. This has not been the case in the past, and the lack of quality data has been a major problem in the development of these tools. This is still the case in much of the world. I used over 4 Gb of raw data, then generated lots of intermediate files, and the final data you see today is only a fraction of that...about 600 Mb. I spent years developing my French research database before I could actually use it.
3)There is also the issue of confidentiality of archaeological site data. These data are very sensitive, from a scientific, political, emotional, legal, and economic perspective. Who should have access to these data? How should these data be controlled? Who should 'own' this information? Who should be denied access? How do we balance these conflicting issues?
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
See you next week, when we will continue working with the Duval dataset.
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