Articles by Gabriele Gattiglia

The MAGOH (Managing Archaeological data for a sustainable Governance of Heritage) project is a two-year project funded by Regione Toscana, co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture (MIC) and coordinated by MAPPA Lab of the University of Pisa. The project was designed to address the needs of the Superintendencies of Florence, Pistoia and Prato and of Pisa and Livorno to manage archaeological data. The project represents the development of the MAPPA project on a larger geographical area of 72,000 km², corresponding to almost all of Northern Tuscany. MAGOH system is composed of a web-based back-end which allows collecting textual and vector data and the archaeological documentation. It contains around 8000 archaeological interventions openly accessible through the web platform and reusable as open data following FAIR principles. Furthermore, through an appositively developed API, it is entirely interoperable with GNA, the National Geoportal for Archaeology, managed by the MIC.

The poorly preserved human bones discovered during the DHOMIAP Project excavation of the necropolis KR-N1 in the area of Khor Rori (Dhofar, Sultanate of Oman) were an opportunity to apply, for the first time in Dhofar’s pre-Islamic funerary contexts, 3D photogrammetry to osteo-archaeological studies. The low economic engagement and the execution speed make this technique essential in the documentation of barely accessible archaeological remains and contexts, as already witnessed by previous studies conducted outside this research area. This paper aims to find a more appropriate method and setting for 3D model photogrammetric reconstruction of human remains, demonstrating the importance of this digital technology for the study of poorly preserved osteo-archaeological remains. For these purposes, the results obtained using two different settings for image acquisition (one with macro and one with standard lens) were compared and discussed.

This paper aims to demonstrate how field data collection applications can represent a good resource in archaeological surveys. As an alternative to the classic paper documentation, using a smartphone application saves time both during the survey (automatic geolocation, GPS tracking) and in the post-processing (easier data import in a computer software, reduction of typo-errors and prevention of transcription errors). The focus of this paper is Geopaparazzi, an open source application for Android that allows customized and easy collection of field data by using a smartphone; collected data are ready to be processed by computer software like GIS. Geopaparazzi 6.1.0 was tested in four archaeological survey campaigns, three in Versilia (Italy, Tuscany) and one in Lampedusa (Italy, Sicily). The two environments are profoundly different: Versilia is a mountain landscape, and Lampedusa is a small island. Moreover, the data collected are different but these differences helped to understand how adaptable the application can be.

Digital technologies are not neutral tools; rather, they mediate our knowledge of material evidence. This contribution stems from the reflections on the sidelines of the ArchAIDE project, which developed AI tools to recognise ceramics and attempts to answer questions, among others, on how technological intervention takes place in archaeology, particularly through AI, and if such effects are disruptive concerning epistemology and hermeneutics. Postphenomenology and material hermeneutics have been considered to describe the relationship between archaeology and digital technology. In the AI age, Archaeology’s challenge is to recognise technology as an actor (or maybe as an agent) on whom we depend on extracting meaning and, at the same time, as something that partially reflects our hermeneutic. The algorithms have digital technological intentionality that creates information, performs hermeneutics in our place, and finally directs archaeologists what to read. This act of knowledge is performed instead of ours. If, in Heidegger’s ontological inversion, science becomes dependent on technology and, in a sense, a tool of technology, in the same way, archaeology has become dependent on technology and entrapped by it.

Intellectual property is generally regarded in human sciences as the right by whoever has produced data to become the owner of them and use them exclusively for years, sometimes for decades (at times dispersing them without permitting anyone else to view them). This practice is based on an incorrect interpretation of the principle of intellectual property, which must not be confused with intellectual ‘maternity’ (a term coined to indicate intellectual authorship), which instead must be protected and exploited more effectively and to a greater extent than today, using a system of accurate references as scientific research is well aware of. The term maternity was chosen because just as ‘…the mother is always certain’, the same may be said for the individual generating and producing the archaeological raw data. In order to determine the ‘mother’ of archaeological data, the research group of MAPPA Lab (University of Pisa) evaluated archaeological documentation in the light of Law 633/41 (Law on copyright and other related rights), articles 106 et seq. of the D.Lgs. 42/2004 (Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape), D.Lgs. 196/2003 (Privacy Code) and D.Lgs. 30/2005 (Industrial Property Code), and of their more recent modifications.

Data and the possibility to circulate and spread them are the key infrastructure of archaeology. Part of the (interpretative) information underlying data is connected to the know-how of each single researcher. Data, instead, are firm points. In this paper, we describe how open data can be used for determining the archaeological potential. We used a sizable number of datasets, in order to consider the problem of estimation of archaeological potential in all of its aspects: archaeological, historical, and geomorphological data. As the identification of relations among finds is a key issue in archaeological interpretation process, we applied a modified version of the PageRank algorithm. The procedure included a categorization of archaeological data, the assignment of initial values of potential to the available data, the creation of geomorphological maps, the definition of functional areas (i.e. the levels of spatial and functional organization: urban, suburban and rural areas), and the application of the PageRank based algorithm. The model has been applied on the urban area of Pisa, and tested through the data of 14 new cores. The map of archaeological potential consists of the composition of the 7 layers, one for each archaeological period under consideration. The results, including the archaeological potential map, are to be considered as the first steps towards an automatic, formally definable, and repeatable approach to the computation of archaeological potential.

An archaeological excavation is an unrepeatable practice. The only action that can be reproduced and re-analysed is the continuous use of raw data. Data sharing, therefore, is the only way to understand and re-examine the archaeological interpretative process and to answer questions regarding new surveys. Data do not circulate freely in Italian archaeology today. In order to make open data searchable (and, therefore, usable), they must be entered in open archives. Only the free access to raw data, based upon an Open Data approach, will allow a further step to be taken towards 2.0 archaeology. The idea of creating an Italian open digital archaeological archive, using data from the urban area of Pisa as case-study, originated from the MAPPA project (Methodologies Applied to Archaeological Potential Predictivity). The main objectives of the MAPPA Open Data (MOD) archive will be to allow simple and free access to all archaeological data (of any type or size) and to guarantee a digital lifecycle for as long as possible.

The main use of GIS in archaeology is connected to regional research or management of excavation data sets. The use of GIS for urban archaeological research is far less extensive. The urban GIS about the medieval town of Pisa contains all archaeological data from occasional findings to modern stratigraphic excavations, geographical data, historical cartography data and urban data, each described by the geometrical shape (point, line, polygon) that best represents each feature. The distinguishing environmental context to which the town is connected is characterized by a complex hydrographic system; GIS analysis enabled us to study the relationships between the urban transformations and the surrounding environment. The article explains how geostatistical analysis allowed us to create a model of the ancient landscape and how the use of map algebra was useful in understanding the medieval environment. The difficulty in finding raw archaeological data, that is, all the excavation and fieldwork recording (planning of context, context recording sheet, photographs, findings quantification sheet), suggested the necessity to create an open digital archive and to provide possible standardization of digital formats, metadata records and archaeological data recording, so as to allow a comparison between the data.

Raw data, the archaeological source code, that is, all the excavation and fieldwork recorded, should be published on digital on-line archives stored in recognizable format documents. This paper contributes to the discussion with the description of a project dedicated to the creation of an urban GIS about medieval Pisa.