Articles by Subject

The NLP tools for the automatic recognition and annotation of titles of figurative artworks from The Classical World, developed by the MonumenTAL project, have evolved through the digital modeling of linguistic patterns. These have helped to broaden the focus from the titles of specific artworks to the naming of generic iconographic types, and to add old and recent expressions specific to art historians and archaeologists. Thanks to this work based on a diachronic approach, a thesaurus of artwork titles (OEUVRE) gathering reference terms, variants and cacographies has been created and is now linked to the online LIMC-France database (corpus of Ancient artworks). The text corpus (Gold standard), from the 18th to the 21st century, and its annotations can now be exploited for statistical analysis or deep learning experimentation.

This article explores the contributions of the Milan branch of CNR-ISPC to the Humanities and Cultural Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud (H2IOSC) Project, focusing on facilitating data integration within Heritage Science. Its primary objective is to ensure seamless interoperability between resources from multiple institutions by establishing a shared semantic framework. The multidisciplinary nature of Heritage Science underscores the necessity for shared data repositories and effective management tools. Recent literature highlights the importance of semantic technologies in improving data integration and interoperability. To this end, the H-SeTIS database is currently under development. H-SeTIS will function as a hub for the systematic surveying and description of various semantic tools relevant to the Heritage domain. Interestingly, a preliminary analysis of data within H-SeTIS reveals that many semantic resources specifically designed to address the unique requirements of the Heritage domain do not meet the minimum quality requirements of accessibility and reusability. This finding underscores a potential area for future development: the creation of H-SeTIS aims to support the ongoing development of a comprehensive ontology for Cultural Heritage, enhancing data FAIRness and the discipline’s overall impact.

Starting in 2017, the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la città metropolitana di Genova e le province di Imperia, La Spezia e Savona (SABAP-LIG) began activities to inventory archaeological assets through the ‘in batches’ inventory system based on the new MINP standard module. The activity was carried out with funds allocated by the General Directorate and has continued annually until 2023, leading to the compilation of about 13,000 modules. Since the first experiment, the DSC (Archaeological Excavation) authority file, which has been developed among the ICCD authority file standards for a while, but used sparingly. It has been identified as a crucial element of the activity because it can be used as a link between catalogue of records describing finds (MINP, MINV) and records describing archaeological sites. Despite the relative simplicity of the data model compared to state-of-the-art initiatives in archaeology data modelling, still it allows an improvement in finds management and knowledge about archaeological heritage.

FAIRification and sharing of open data is an important aspect of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and its archaeology related consortium NFDI4Objects. NFDI4Objects offers domain-specific data-driven hubs to publish and share research data, Linked Open Data (LOD), ontologies, community-driven vocabularies and authority files, such as thesauri. This paper demonstrates the content, challenges and possibilities of the Data Hub ‘archaeology.link’. It consists of five thematic parts: 1) Semantic Modelling using the Linked Archaeological Data Ontology (LADO), 2) publication of domain-specific Linked Open Data, 3) community-driven vocabularies such as thesauri, 4) ontologies and 5) research tools.

By exploring the importance of archeological images databases in the history of studies, the article presents the digital archiving activities initiated within the PNRR Changes, Spoke 8, Project. The objective of the activities is the attribution of metadata to this type of images, for the purpose of their dialogue with European infrastructures. This process represents a tool for supporting different knowledge paths and maximizing the accessibility of the Cultural Heritage, according to the goals of the Project. The article therefore presents the activity carried out so far, namely the development of a metadata table, developed following the recognition of the main national and international thesauri and taxonomies, as well as a first metadating experiment conducted on a dataset of approximately 600 images from A&C Journal.

The Open Digital Epigraphy Hub (EpiHub) is an open access digital platform developed to streamline accessibility and organization of resources in digital epigraphy. Created within the Humanities and Cultural Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud (H2IOSC), EpiHub addresses the fragmented landscape of digital epigraphic resources, which span disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology. Offering a comprehensive catalogue of national and international resources – such as datasets, digital tools, geographical and chronological gazetteers, dictionaries, and text-processing software – EpiHub structures these assets through descriptive metadata to facilitate discoverability and usability for researchers and practitioners across diverse cultural and temporal scopes. The platform’s flexible back-end architecture supports efficient data management and real-time updates to enhance front-end accessibility, organizing resources by thematic collections and allowing advanced searches based on specific epigraphic needs, such as language, geographic region, or historical period. Emphasizing FAIR principles, EpiHub standardizes metadata and controlled vocabularies to foster broader interoperability and data reuse across research projects. Integrated with related H2IOSC resources, including H-SeTIS and DHeLO, EpiHub aims to become a central resource, continuously enriched to support collaboration and innovation within the digital epigraphy community.

This paper presents an update to an earlier proposal for a standardized open format for archaeological stratigraphy data, the Harris Matrix Data Package, and the accompanying software tool implementation. The update is two-fold: firstly, it aims at a clear separation between data format and the software tool, particularly by defining the data format in more detail and independently from the software used to create or analyze it; secondly, it introduces a new software feature that allows the creation of a new ‘data package’ from scratch. A third issue that was identified is the lack of tools for converting existing data to and from the Harris Matrix Data Package, but this issue is not dealt with in this paper.

The German Archaeological Institute (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, DAI) conducts a variety of different types of field research, each with its own unique documentation requirements: excavations, surveys and architectural surveys. The resulting differences are reflected in the workflows, the recording methods and the documentation. In addition, the DAI’s international work has to comply with the guidelines of the respective heritage agencies in the host countries. iDAI.field is the system for documenting archaeological fieldwork at the DAI. From the very beginning it was developed to meet these very different requirements. The development spanned several years, major versions and associated, far-reaching technology changes. The latest iteration of the application relies exclusively on open source technologies and is published on GitHub under the Apache License 2.0 in accordance with DAI-IT’s open source policy. In order to open up the application to other interested researchers and/or developers, the focus of the last year has been the implementation of an extended configuration interface and the removal of dependencies from the DAI infrastructure. This article outlines the development history, introduces the currently available functionalities, and briefly discusses the data model, followed by an overview of the technologies used. It also describes the development into a real open source product and gives a short outlook on the future plans.

Scientific literature understanding benefits from visual resources, which is even more evident in the case of material cultural heritage. In recent years, journals and publishing platforms have been increasingly offering extensive access to publications via the contextual provision of visual media, such as images and 3D models. The diamond open access journal ‘Archeologia e Calcolatori’, founded in 1990, started publishing its articles in 2005 on its website and has always paid attention to giving proper value and presentation to visual contents related to publications. Indeed, it maintained an online image gallery displaying colour plates from volumes until coloured images started being embedded in the articles’ PDFs (since 2009). Then, in 2021, the journal added images and 3D models as resources together with publications and displayed them both as standalone content and in relation to articles. However, this later work did not include the previous thirty-year-long history of the journal, since it required close cooperation with authors. Thus a new dedicated web application was specifically developed to present a structured and visually appealing archive of about 4000 images. The paper illustrates this application, entitled A&C_IADI (Interactive Atlas of Digital Images).

Open Science best practices and policies have been increasingly promoted and adopted in Europe and worldwide to extend public availability of research data and publications, according to FAIR principles. In this context, the so-called ‘Diamond Open Access’ model is particularly relevant since it entails provision of scientific content entirely free of charge, both for authors and readers. The journal Archeologia e Calcolatori adopted this model at a very early stage, when - in 2005 - it started publishing online full-text PDFs and metadata of its articles according to recognised standards, as an Open Archives Initiative data provider. This paper addresses the evolution of ‘Archeologia e Calcolatori’ in the context of scientific publishing in the disciplinary domain of IT applications to archaeology. It focuses on the updates of its OAI-PMH repository, which led to the journal’s inclusion in OpenAIRE as a data provider, and on mapping its current position in the OA Diamond landscape. The paper also illustrates recent implementations of Archeologia e Calcolatori’s website to provide full access to visual and interactive resources, such as images and 3D models, related to its publications, and to relevant metadata, structured according to OpenAIRE’s most recent guidelines. The combined, contextual provision of full texts, visual and interactive resources, and structured metadata – including full annotations and relations turns out to be a pioneering publishingservice in the domain of IT applications to archaeology.

The rich epigraphic heritage of the Castello Ursino Civic Museum of Catania has been studied by the EpiCUM project that encoded it in EpiDoc TEI XML, an XML based standard digital representation for cultural heritage contents. The project made the epigraphic heritage available in a digital museum: under the guise of the ‘Voci di Pietra’ exhibition, a selection of epigraphs were presented, implementing innovative presentation modalities thanks to a smart use of technological and digital means. Information contained in the epigraphs was semantically reorganized in a unique homogeneous container, the EpiONT ontology, constructed according to the Linked Open Data paradigm and to consolidated international standards. The encoding of the ancient texts, by the TEI standard and its EpiDoc subset, is wedded to the paradigmatic semantic web model for museums and cultural heritage. The EpiONT ontology is currently populated by 580 epigraphs collected in the Castello Ursino Civic Museum. Designed according to the CIDOC CRM standard, it makes use of the SKOS vocabularies of the EAGLE project concerning material, execution technique, type of inscription, and type of support of an epigraph. The EpiONT ontology additionally can handle any uncertainty in the origin and place of discovery of the epigraphs.

Ancient objects, be they materials collected on archaeological sites or displayed in museums, simultaneously carry information (type and material, decoration, location, etc.) and are subject to study (analysis, reproduction, publication, etc.). The CIDOC CRM is an ontology intended to facilitate the integration, mediation and interchange of cultural heritage information. This standard gives us the possibility to structure detailed descriptions of individual items (a vase or a statue, etc.), of parts of a whole (a fragment or an element of architectural decoration), or of conceptual objects (models known through its replicas, typology, and taxonomy), and covers contextual information such as the historical, geographical and theoretical background. Associated with technical standards and thesauri, the CIDOC CRM is helpful for data interchange, interoperability, Semantic Web and Linked Data approach.

The tools developed by the LIMC (databases and web site LIMC-France) give access to Graeco-Roman objects decorated with mythological or religious representations. Created in 1981, this system has constantly evolved in order to fit the needs of new fields of research, standards and practices of the Internet. Thanks to the use of standards (Dublin Core, TEI, CIDOC-CRM, WGS 84, XMP/IPTC) the databases of the LIMC are combined with other archaeological databases on the international web portal CLAROS whose Semantic Web approach and the innovative tools optimize the use of the data by the 'internaut'.

General principles of recording data in archaeology, developed and consolidated during the past thirty years have spawned a multiplicity of conceptual models and robust software solutions. Inrap, as the main actor at the national level, must foster the harmonization of different approaches to the recording of data in order to improve methods of collecting and sharing data. The paper shows the different solutions and main tools for data capture being applied by the excavation team managers of the Institute, considering the particularities of these tools such as origin, method, type of field, and scientific questioning. Moreover, the adjustments to which these tools are being subjected in order to fit different situations are presented. The focus is on an ongoing project to establish progressive convergence among the possible approaches, including the promotion of the development of a conceptual platform shared with the Ministry of Culture, which would allow a 'branding' of various databases. The use of a standard like the CIDOC-CRM, the international standard of reference for the exchange of information on cultural heritage, could serve as a reference.

The purpose of this paper is to give answers to the following questions: can digitization be comprehended as a kind of scientific research? What is the possible object of scientific research on digitization? Can the science of digitization have a particular terminology and methods? The paper focuses also on the discussion about the object of digitization research which may be called emulativity, i.e. a specific phenomenon induced by digital technologies, the virtual world and the Internet which may be studied in many senses including personality psychology. Possible trends of scientific research on digitization, interdisciplinarity, terminology and methods of the science of digitization are also discussed, from the perspective of digitization as a science. In many countries digitization is basically perceived as just a practical field of activity and performed according to this perception. We suggest that a broader approach would be more suitable by investigating the scientific character of digitization, aimed at the empirical and experimental fixing of objective phenomenon of reality that could be investigated by the new science.

In this paper, we discuss the potentialities of the integration of open data formats (the so called “standards”), open source software and free licenses in the field of cultural heritage.

The paper describes the findings of a geo-electric study conducted at the archaeological site of Torraccia di Chiusi (Siena Province) with the use of soil resistivity modelling. In collaboration with the Département d’Archéologie et Histoire de l’Art (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium) and the Centro di GeoTecnologie (Università degli Studi di Siena), a new, non-invasive instrument, named the OhmMapper, was used for the first time in an archaeological context to provide geophysical sections of the terrain. The aim of the study was to evaluate the nature and distribution of the buried anthropogenic structures and to properly locate them on the map without the necessity of excavating. The site, located in the valley of the Foci river, has been described as a long lasting settlement (III to VII centuries AD, although ceramics dating to the II century BC have been uncovered). The OhmMapper is a capacitively coupled resistivity meter that measures the electrical properties of rocks and soil without ground stakes used in traditional resistivity surveys. A simple coaxial-cable array with transmitter and receiver sections is pulled along the ground either by a single person or attached to an all-terrain vehicle. The dipole-dipole configuration enables the instrument to immediately pick up the horizontal variations in resistivity, thereby enabling the user to identify structures such as walls or cavities. With the OhmMapper, nine sections were made around the perimeter of the area already excavated to collect data on the presence, depth, and dimensions of anthropogenic structures. The results from the sections were refined and placed on a map using an ArcGIS platform. The interpretation of the nine sections resulted in a new hypothesis on the buried anthropogenic structures and a new model of the natural landscape that existed at the site prior to its construction.

The Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici di Ostia is the Italian government office charged with the preservation of the ancient Roman city of Ostia and its surroundings. Ostia has been the object of excavations since the Middle Ages and has yielded an enormous quantity of finds of all kinds. The Soprintendenza today undertakes mostly preventive excavations, especially in connection with public works. These result in vast quantities of finds that need to be housed in the office’s stores. Since 2004 the management of the stores has availed itself of the use of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFId), an automatic identification method relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFId tags or transponders. An advanced automatic identification technology based on the RFId technology has two values for inventory systems. First, the visibility provided by this technology allows an accurate knowledge on the inventory level by eliminating the discrepancy between inventory record and physical inventory. Second, the RFId technology can prevent or reduce the sources of errors. Benefits of using RFId include the reduction of labour costs, the simplification of business processes and the reduction of inventory inaccuracies.

The use of third-party data is becoming an increasingly important part of archaeological research but there has been little critical analysis of such data sets, or their use. This paper highlights both the challenges and benefits of third-party data through discussion of the experiences of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Viking and Anglo-Saxon Landscape and Economy. It shows that the background organisation and intended audience of third-party data set can greatly affect how the data is collated and presented, and the enhancement of such resources for particular research aims may be labour intensive and time consuming, and should not be underestimated. However, it is argued that the usefulness of third-party data sets outweighs any potential problems which may be encountered, but that there needs to be recognition of these challenges and appropriate training provided for future archaeologists.

Despite the fact that an increasing number of researchers in the cultural heritage sector is recognising the advantages that could derive from the use of knowledge management methodologies and tools, a lack of awareness of the basic principles of this discipline is still rather evident. Key concepts like “knowledge representation”, metadata, conceptual modeling, syntactic or semantic interoperability, ontologies, can prove difficult to understand (and even more difficult to apply) for researchers with a background in the humanities. This contribution, therefore, aims at clarifying the theoretical reference framework through the concrete analysis of archaeological materials. In fact, while it seems easier to borrow definitions and theoretical concepts or to artificially create even very complex conceptual models (e.g. the CIDOC CRM, which has recently been recognised as an ISO standard), it is a lot harder to implement such principles onto real world objects analysis. According to this assessment, and to the need of going from theoretical to practical aspects, the paper is structured in three parts: the first offers a theoretical base that makes available, even for non-experts, the tools for addressing more operational aspects; the second describes, through practical examples, both the knowledge representation model and the software tool used for analysing a class of materials, the Etruscan urns, as shown in the third part. The final objective is, therefore, to provide a point of reference for facilitating the approach towards KM (Knowledge Management) and help clarifying the key elements of a discipline that is obtaining a growing success but, so far, still showing a high level of entropy.

This report describes the observations made while developing a new methodology for historic surveys used for the re-contextualisation of archaeological finds. This particular methodology avails itself of both traditional historic surveys as well as the representation of knowledge through ontology. The methodology described here was developed in reference to specific cases of re-contextualisation of archaeological artefacts from Pompeii which are now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.

This article presents a detailed overview of the principal languages for the representation, interchange and exploitation of data, both textual and graphical. In particular, a detailed discussion is made of the procedure of text encoding. The approach taken in the article emphasises the importance of the World Wide Web for data dissemination and the fundamental issue of standards: HTML, XML and its derivate languages are analysed in detail. Importance has been given to the languages that represent not only the characters that textual sources contain but also the structure, content and appearance of the data. Two types of markup languages are presented: procedural and descriptive. A procedural markup specifies how the document should be presented. Descriptive (or logical) markup languages describe the structure of a document, such as SGML. The article considers the topics of international standards as the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange for the description of marked-up electronic texts and the RDF metadata recommendation. The first section concludes with a presentation of the innovative aspects of the Semantic Web. The second part focuses on spatial, graphical and multimedia data, and their display and exchange over the Web. The development of the Geography Markup Language (GML) is introduced and discussed, as well as other vector formats derived by XML, such as SVG, to construct structured spatial and non-spatial information for data sharing over the Web. Importance has also been given to the virtual reality languages such as VRML, an ISO standard, and the XML-based X3D. In conclusion the article aims to present a broad view not only of the technical aspects of data encoding but also the analysis of the standards, which are fundamental in the light of data interoperability and exchange

The problem of coding archaeological finds is discussed. The different items susceptible to coding are described according to the kind of information that must be collected. Some new coding techniques are described in particular: the landmarks technique, to be used for the shape analysis of corpora of finds all having a similar shape; the textual coding, useful for the study of images, once both the elements and attitudes and the sub-images composing the image are taken into account; a symbolic coding, to be used in the study of the syntactical structure of the images, describing the relations among items, regardless of the iconographical content. An overview of the exploratory analysis issues is given as conclusion.

The Dictionary of Subjects and the TTA are the results of the cataloguing of bibliographical resources. The TTA is a source of archaeological sites (8000 sites in the Mediterranean area, mostly in Tuscany) indexed by category. In TTA a place-name is the logical focus of a record. The record place-name includes the preferred place-name, the variant names and the historical names, the note that provides archaeological information about the place, the relative position in the administrative division of the State, the geographic coordinates (UTM or Gauss Boaga) and the bibliographic sources. The purpose of the TTA is to contribute to the knowledge of the topographical distribution of ancient peoples, with the advantage that the administrative subdivisions reflect those used by the Italian Institutes responsible for cultural heritage.

The article presents some aspects of the research project which has been carried out in the middle Tiber Valley (Sabina Tiberina), to analyse the distribution of archaeological sites in the territory, based on new field surveys and the study of archive documents ('Progetto Galantina'). The research takes advantage of the positive experiment conducted by the Istituto di Studi sulle Civiltà Italiche e del Mediterraneo Antico (ISCIMA) of the Italian CNR to set up and integrate within a Geographical Information System a new model of archiving, managing and querying archaeological information, focused on the analysis of excavation diaries and their SGML and XML encoding. The implemented system gives rise to a many-sided repeatable digital model, easily exportable in various situations. The integration between the DTD established to formally describe archaeological data and the elements of the TEI Lite and Dublin Core standards makes it possible to record and query data coming from both published excavation reports and archive documents dating from the nineteenth century, which deal with the description of archaeological itineraries around Rome. The example presented in this paper refers to the manuscript by Ercole Nardi 'Ruderi delle Ville Romano-Sabine nei dintorni di Poggio Mirteto' (1885) and is aimed at preserving archaeological information through digital supports, electronic exchange formats and especially reliability of the information integrity. Moreover, it makes an attempt to experiment and develop new forms of knowledge diffusion which are more suitable for interactive web consultation than passive reading.

As part of the Caere Project, the author describes the diverse stages that have characterised the acquisition and encoding in a digital format of the excavation diaries through the application of SGML. This encoding language for electronic documents is focused mostly on describing the internal structure of the data and the information contained in the text. The SGML syntax in some aspects is complex, and inevitably this has been an obstacle to the diffusion of the language. The transcription and the encoding of the diaries have been completed and a flexible querying system of the SGML documents has been created. The decision to use the Internet in order to distribute information has also implied a study of the viability of converting SGML documents into XML, which in the last few years has been replacing SGML, from which it derives. However, the completion of the encoding project of the excavation diaries does not represent the final stage; in fact, it is the new phase that it has initiated which is important: further DTDs will be created which will allow the acquisition and encoding of the descriptions of every find. The user will be able to navigate and explore the textual data and, where a more detailed study is required, analyse the objects together with the topographical information.

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.

The main subject of this article is the problem of the filing of textual data in archaeology in order that they can be analysed and processed automatically. This problem is closely associated to another topic, that of text encoding. An electronic text may contain more than one markup level. The first one is the character encoding, usually the ASCII - 7 bit set, that offers 127 bit combination to represent letters, digits and a few other signs. The ASCII code has the advantage of being a standard valid for every operating system. It is therefore suggested, to encode other signs not included in the ASCII set, the use of a combination of the 127 available characters rather than a combination of 8 bit (256 possible combinations), because the number codes greater than 127 are used for different signs on different systems. A document file may contain another markup that encodes format parameters. To transform a simple document into a “database” where information can be searched and retrieved, the conceptual components must be encoded. The Standard Generalized Markup Language appears to be a good tool to produce files that are software and hardware independent, easy to be managed and ready to be automatically analysed by a software in order to retrieve pieces of information.

Formalisation of data, which is the base of encoding procedures, raises a number of problems which should not be solved, as it is usually done, through generic intuition. Starting from Gardin's discussion of the «compilations», as distinct from «explanations», and from Gordon Childe's late epistemological propositions, the formalisation is defined as the production of structures of symbols which perfectly match the archaeological evidente as the scholars sees it. This may be done by means of different types of language; using computers requires modelling techniques. They depend on our appreciation of the evidence itself, and semiotics helps us in distinguishing between material evidence and its symbolic meaning.

The authors show here, through an example, how the reasoning procedures in an archaeological construct can be analysed, represented, critically evaluated, and possibly transcribed so as to be used again as part of an expert system. The monograph which has been analysed is an extract from a study on the prehistorical origins of the myth of Classical Greek Demeter. The reasoning steps of the author are first extracted and rewritten in the form of chains of inferences, according to J.-C. Gardin’s logicist approach. These components are then transcribed in terms of a fact base and a rule base according to the SNARK system. The SNARK knowledge base, as well as the results of the computing, are presented as tools for a better understanding of reasoning in the humanities.

Encoding problems are often neglected, in archaeological as in other humanities related research, because of their apparent triviality. Encoding is assumed to be the reproduction in an “electronic alphabet” (be it the ASCII code or a second level language like SGML) of something written on paper. On the contrary, the encoding process begins with the recognition, choice and declaration of the elements of reality which we are going to submit to an electronic process. As a consequence, we must examine very carefully the substance of the logical and formal passages that we undertake. This article tries to show the difference between many kinds of encoding and the significance of encoding in archaeology, in comparison with other opinions, mainly by J.-CI. Gardin and F. Djindjian.

The trend in the use of computers in the Humanities, unlike taught or social sciences applications, seems to be the coexistence and exchange of many small or medium-size databases (both textual and “factual”) rather than larger ones, developed in big institutions. This requires two main conditions: a common operating environment and standards in the organisation and encoding of data. In archaeology, as in other disciplines, Unix offers a convenient solution for problem 1, and relational database theory for problem 2. An example is given of how a database may be organised and managed exclusively with the native tools of Unix and plain ASCII files.