Articles by Denis Francisci

ArchaeoSection is a software for drawing archaeological sections. Its goal is to automatically rotate section points measured with total station and to insert them in a geodatabase and GIS: this software is supposed to be a third way between traditional techniques and the most advanced digital systems of section record. This paper presents the technical properties of ArchaeoSection, how it works, its usage for different types of section and the advantages of a geodatabase-GIS management of archaeological sections. ArchaeoSection is also an example of the potential of FLOSS, that allows archaeologists without programming experience to build their work tools on their own, like an ancient craftsman.

This article illustrates the fourth release of ArcheOS, the first GNU-Linux distribution developed for archaeological aims and released under GPL. Since the first version in 2005, this free operating system has attempted to satisfy all the needs of an archaeological project, covering every single step of the operating workflow, from data collection and storage to elaboration, publication and sharing. The main target of the project is to spread the use of Free and Open Source software and to apply the ideology of the Free Software movement to archaeology itself (a central postulation of the Free Software Foundation is the free circulation of data and ideas). The new release Caesar, based on Debian Squeeze 6.0, has some important changes in the organization of the structure of the entire project. In fact, the developer team focused more on the stability of the operating system and an on-line service to keep the different programs (APT deb-repository) up to date. Caesar ensures a better hardware integration and a more accurate selection of software. The research of new technological solutions is one of the most important aspects of the project, which, from this aspect, is strongly connected with innovation in archaeological methodology.

Fabric analysis in archaeology is the study of the spatial arrangement of a deposit through measurement of bearing and plunge angles of its singular components (natural and/or artificial) and through analysis of their mutual spatial relations and with the external environment. In recent years some archeologists (Lenoble, Bertran, McPherron, etc.) have developed a standard procedure for angular data collection and for statistical treatment of this information. The author proposes some conceptual and methodological innovations to improve this method: the application of fabric analysis to any historical and depositional context (in particular, anthropic contexts); the use of "ab plane" (instead of "a axis") for measurement of bearing and plunge of clasts; the development of spatial analyses associated with traditional statistical treatments; the management of data through geodatabase and GIS directly connected to the statistical software. In the future, this method will need other improvements in order to provide more information about origins, causes, and dynamics that produced a specific deposit from fabric analyses.