Articles by Daniel Arroyo-Bishop

The ArchéoDATA Archaeological Information System has been under development for some ten years and during this time considerable experience has been gained in the field of archaeological information management. At the outset, a methodological philosophy was established and based on the premise that archaeology was in essence something, somewhere, at sometime. This provided the fundamental platform for data recording and has also given rise to, through the development of the “Entities”, a singular framework for archaeological analysis. The structures necessary to achieve an efficient balance between research, administration and conservation have been worked out and then tested under the actual conditions that will prevail under normal working conditions. The problem has been that at the heart of an AIS is communication, and that the practical means of achieving this are not simple. Not only do we need to efficiently structure the theoretical model, there also has to be the physical means of achieving it. This has been for many years the Achilles heal of implementation, as cost has been seen as being of an order not commensurate with archaeological budgets. The unforeseen evolution of the Internet network into the World Wide multimedia Web has provided information based systems with vast possibilities, and in the case of archaeology, with its first opportunity towards implementing universal communication. This paper describes some of the steps being undertaken to transfer the ArchéoDATA AIS to the Internet.

Due to the limited response to the CNR questionnaire on GIS usage in French archaeology, this paper cannot expect to give either the full extent of implementation, nor fully document its impact on this field of research. It has been possible however to extrapolate general trends, and to discuss the development of several projects and undertakings. The most important implementation of GIS is the Ministry of Culture’s nationwide SCALA program for French archaeological survey, and the most comprehensive is the CNRS’s ArchéoDATA Archaeological Information System (AIS). The majority of the smaller projects are in three sectors: regional governmental archaeological offices, the CNRS research laboratories and archaeological field units. As the majority of GIS projects are undertaken by small teams that are looking for flexibility and autonomy, the general trend in hardware/software configurations has been away from elaborate centralised systems and towards micro-computer based installations, with the combination usually being Map Info running on PCs and Macintoshs. Whilst the use of GIS is still not entirely common practice in French archaeology, it is important to note that considerable research is going into innovative ways of implementing GIS concepts in archaeology and that important results can be expected in the years to come.

During the past few years we have presented and published a series of papers on the project ArchéoDATA that we have been developing in the GDR 880 of CNRS, in our quest for a methodological structure for the recording and analysis of archaeological data and the creation of a European Archaeological Information System, designed to formalise and to structure archaeological documents. The three basic components of archaeological recording and analysis are the factors “objects”, “space” and “time”. Through their interaction the archaeologist must attempt to construct an interpretation and argue his thesis. The management of data pertaining to each one of the components of “object”, “space” and “time” should be undertaken with the same elementary structure. Due to the diversity of recording methods, and to inconsistent terminology used to express what in essence are similar things, a definition based on the word “Entity” was chosen and the “Archaeological, Spatial, Temporal, Interpretative and Analytical Entities” were consequently defined. This paper presents in detail new work that has been undertaken on structuring the basic component “time”.

The author illustrates the structuring that was carried out for the development of the ArchéoDATA project with the aim of forming a basis for a more general Archaeological Information System. The conception of this project was undertaken from an archaeological perspective; the subsequent use of computers, and in particular the possibilities offered by GIS, enabled the enhancement of the system. The problems of basic information are also discussed, with an attempt to overcome the traditional concepts of site, finds and features by replacing them with the more general concepts of spatial and temporal entities and interpretative grouping.