Articles by Etienne Hofmann

Since 2003 when the Archaeological Unit City of Lyon (SAVL) was appointed by the French Ministry of Culture as a preventive archaeological operator, the increase inactivity revealed the need for a standardized in field recording tool. In the meantime, the state archaeological services required the different operators to adopt an extreme degree of homogeneity in the final excavation reports, in order to improve the long term management plan of the archaeological artifacts. This double evolution drove the SAVL to adopt an operating system development from the field to the final report process built on the ‘ALyAS’ GIS (Archéologie Lyonnaise et Analyse Spatiale). This system, enhanced as an additional tool for the French institutional GIS ‘Patriarche’, proceeds, with the overall results, from the archaeological fact scale to the topographic mapping feature. To the original database core (archaeological data, referenced documents and ancient map recordings) an extension module focusing on in field recording is added. The ongoing purpose of these tools is to connect the field recording results to GIS final processing. This approach links the immediate targets of preventive archaeology (reports) to the archaeological data management involved in a long lasting territorially applied GIS system. In the near future, some extensions should also respond to the institutional request, and each time become more refined, particularly when compiling archaeological artifacts recording the final archaeological reports.