Articles by Simona Mariotti

The author describes the experimentation of the Text Encoding Initiative Lite for the encoding of published archaeological documents, a part of the research program of the Caere Project. In fact, the experimentation with SGML as a tool for documenting, querying and subsequently interpreting the yearly diaries of the Vigna Parrocchiale excavations suggested expanding the use of this encoding procedure to also include published archaeological reports, particularly those associated with other monumental features in the urban plateau of Cerveteri. As a case study, the encoding scheme of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Lite, integrated by the DTD already defined, has been used in the publication of the excavations conducted in 1912-13 by Raniero Mengarelli, in the same area of the Vigna Parrocchiale, and published in «Studi Etruschi» in 1936. In order to verify the flexibility of this encoding method within different types of archaeological publications, the same procedure has been experimented on another text written in 1937 by Raniero Mengarelli and extracted from «Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità».

In 1996 the Istituto per l’Archeologica Etrusco-Italica of the Italian National Research Council proposed, within the Cultural Heritage Special Project, the research programme “Establishment of an Archaeological Information System model and its application to ancient Caere” (“The Caere Project”). Its purpose is to use an archaeological information system to study the ancient Etruscan town of Caere, where the Institute has been carrying out surveys and excavations since 1982, together with the Superintendence of Southern Etruria. The authors illustrate an aspect of the project, related to the computerisation of the “Vigna Parrocchiale” excavation data. In fact, an innovative procedure was followed, through the use of the Standard Generalized Markup Language in order to encode the yearly excavation diaries in hypertext format. In this way, an easily transferable HTML text illustrated with photographic and graphic information was established. This type of text, which will be immediately available on-line, has allowed us to test new kinds of queries and information retrieval, in order to diachronically investigate the successive stages of our excavation and to organise the documentation relative to different areas, until finally reaching the essential association and the subsequent analysis of finds, also through the use of a statistical approach.