Articles by Maria Pia Guermandi

Review article.

In the first part, the paper introduces the section that collects historical syntheses of some of the most relevant issues related to technological applications in archaeology. Databases, GIS, multimedia applications, cataloguing activities of archaeological heritage, museums, and the Internet are the fields chosen to illustrate more than 25 years of research, projects, realizations. The paper stresses common criticisms and recurrent difficulties in these sectors of research, but also important results and achievements for archaeology on the whole. In the second part, the paper briefly discusses the relationship between the Internet and archaeology. Web applications in archaeology started in the early 1990s. Initially, archaeologists were very suspicious of web reliability: the Internet was a useful tool for popularization purposes, not for scientific research. The paper discusses reasons for the failure of some archaeological applications - for example electronic publishing and limited area search engine - and success of others: museum web sites above all, with their effective use of visual and interactive web technologies. Nowadays the Internet is an almost unavoidable tool for every type of archaeological research and it seems to have become the comprehensive frame in which all other technological applications are expressed. Internet technologies could introduce a new communication structure in archaeological research with the use of interactivity and hypermedia. The last challenges in ICT are the so called Web 2.0, social computing and a radically innovative vision of hypertext structure: these research fields could change the way of archaeological culture communication and knowledge transmission.

This paper will briefly discuss the development of networking communication technologies in the archaeology field. Internet technologies could introduce a new communication structure with the use of interactivity and hypermedia: but until now archaeological web sites still operate fundamentally through language, using almost exclusively a 'symbolic-reconstructive' cognitive way that is a linguistic way; on the other hand another way of knowledge transmission is a 'perceptive-motor' based on repeating cycles of perception-action-perception. Technologies that are web based, both visual and interactive, allow us to learn and exchange knowledge by-passing the linguistic barrier. Nowadays the computer is able to simulate a universe and make it available for human perceptive-motor activity. The constructivist learning theory often informs these new approaches, however, transplanting learning theory to the web poses unique challenges.

Review article.

Review article.

Review article.

This article is a short review of the history of representation and structuring of archaeological information in computer applications as from HW/SW growing technical development. In the seventies and eighties databases were the most popular and widespread application of computer technology to archaeology. In the eighties micro and personal computers dramatically increased database research projects. This uncoordinated growth led to a plethora of disparate systems incapable of information exchange, although this phenomenon did considerably increase the normalization and standardization of archaeological data. Starting at the end of the eighties, GIS application to archaeology became more and more popular and the number of GIS research projects quickly increased. In adopting GIS technologies, however, the archaeologist must be aware of problems connected with specific nature of spatial data (cartography is always a simplification of the real world) and their accuracy. In the last five years, network communication, and above all the Internet, have assumed a central role in archaeological research and the communication standard protocols derived from SGML will be a central tool for improving public access to the archaeological heritage and for enabling teaching and research.

The Internet is increasingly becoming a tool fundamentally important and effective archaeological research. Archaeology is an appropriate subject through which to promote the use of electronic media as it is multidisciplinary, with a wide range of data types. Resources offered by the Internet provide a means of sharing and distributing information of many different kinds in many different ways. Actually, archive material – ranging from field survey data, excavations and museum collections to ancient sources – are being made available through the web. The author presents the most interesting sites (key sites, electronic journals and above all museums) available on web, and discusses problems and difficulties of conducting research via the Internet. The WWW could change radically the way in which archaeologists communicate the results of their work, both for the benefit of other archaeologists and the wider public. On-line journals, for example, could be an important tool to solve printed media problems and difficulties for editing archaeological reports. Museums could be seen as the most important virtual place to visit in order to explore the world and its history. Unfortunately, current archaeological museum sites often restrict themselves to provide only basic and general information (addresses, exhibits, virtual tours) aimed at a large rather than a professional public. The Internet is never going to replace real museums or archaeological sites; it is going to be supplementary.

The author illustrates the activity of Istituto Beni Culturali (IBC), the cultural institution of Regione Emilia Romagna with regard to the use of new technology in cultural heritage. IBC, a unique example in Italy, has created in 1990 a public company to manage the public resources and to coordinate the computerized cataloguing of the regional cultural heritage: the Centro Regionale per il Catalogo (CRC). Since 1993 IBC administers a regional museum fund (L.R. 20/90) and holds a major role in programming the regional policy in the field of local authority museums and cataloguing of museum objects. The Documentation Centre of IBC has elaborated the guidelines for recording information about objects preserved in local museum: our main aim is to provide every museum with a system to perform some essential activities; administration and cataloguing over all. As regards to cataloguing rules we follow the ICCD directives (precataloguing cards) in order to create a regional archive of cultural heritage conserved in museums. As regards software we have chosen an information retrieval system, Odysseus, very flexible and developed in a modular way. Actually Odysseus is used to catalogue museum cultural heritage, to realize data bases for the Internet and to realize archaeological maps.

The paper illustrates the role of interactive multimedia for museum professionals in Emilia Romagna region. Their introduction is affecting the role of the traditional museum, but their effectiveness for exhibition interpretation has not been explored in depth until now. The authors discuss the problems that museum professionals have had in the use, implementation and evaluation of multimedia: the main is the lack of an adequate communications strategy in the museum educational projects. The paper presents the results of a survey on the use of multimedia program in an archaeological museum in Emilia Romagna. The evaluation project was carried out with different groups of one targeted audience: schoolchildren. The evaluation has investigated if visitors spend more time with the objects after using the application or are they distracted and absorbed by the novelty of the technology, and in general if the program creates a positive attitude towards archaeology and museums.

The article presents problems connected to the management of iconographic data using computer science tools. In particular, the authors discuss especially the computerised management of Athenian figure-decorated pottery which represents perhaps the most relevant set of iconographic patterns in classical antiquity. Up to now this pottery has been investigated by means of quantitative analyses to study in particular the mechanics of ancient trade in the Mediterranean basin because Athenian vases, from 6th to 4th century BC were widely exported all around this area. The computerisation of iconographic information, however, presents many difficulties: in fact archaeologists tend to express iconic information by means of linguistic sentences which are often inadequate; moreover there are still many problems about the correct interpretation of representations on attic pottery. On this subject, the authors illustrate a project on Athenian decorated pottery found at Spina, the Etruscan “emporion” of the Upper Adriatic, where the most impressive collection of Athenian decorated vases of the 5th century BC was discovered. A database has been created which collects data on 2132 clay decorated vases made in Athens: iconographic information is represented both with a description in natural language and by means of terms of a thesaurus conceived for this purpose. The database has also been explored through statistical analyses, such as Correspondence Analysis and Multidimensional Scaling, to find significative interrelationships between shapes and subjects, to identify associations between the different subjects represented on the same vase and to stress changes, as time passed, with regard to shapes and subjects.

The authors present the research activity carried out at the Istituto di Archeologia of Bologna University. The projects concern in particular ceramic artefacts, from attic black-figured pottery to coarse ware. The procedures followed for the storage, retrieval and data analysis use DBMS, IRS, CAD and statistical packages. A database system was created in order to examine the diffusion of Athenian pottery during the first half of the VI century and to consider possible “export models”, archaic trade overseas of attic black-figured pottery and the role of fine Athenian vases in their own production context. In the coarse ware research project, statistical procedures and quantitative analyses were carried out in order to create a problem-oriented classification in which the pottery was used as an anthropological indicator. Finally, some computer graphics applications were undertaken with some fragmentary coarse ware vessels, and a comparison made with the traditional graphical representations.

ALADINO is a database system created by the Centro di Documentazione of the Istituto Beni Culturali. It was used for data storage and retrieval during the course of the Roman and medieval excavations at Castelraimondo (Udine - Italy). Its distinctive features are flexibility, user friendly interfaces, the use of natural language and the automatic integration of alphanumeric data and images. ALADINO produces distribution maps of data acquired during excavation and allows frequency tables and simple uni- and bivariate analyses. At present, ALADINO has been further improved with new releases and it will be connected with other programs in order to study coarse wares through statistical analyses (cluster, multivariate, etc.) and to further implement a real computer-based information system.