Archaeological Informatics

The study of the human past has conventionally been divided between two distinct academic disciplines depending upon the kind of evidence under investigation: "history", with its focus on written records, and "archaeology", which analyzes the remains of material culture. Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East aims to bridge this disciplinary divide by providing an international forum for scholarly discussions which integrate the studies of material culture with written documents. Interdisciplinary by nature, the journal offers a platform for professional historians and archaeologists alike to critically investigate points of confluence and divergence between the textual and the artifactual. We seek contributions from scholars working in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Contributions with a theoretical or methodological focus on the interface between archaeology and text are especially encouraged. By publishing all of its articles online, the Archaeology and Text seeks to disseminate its published papers immediately after the peer-review and editorial processes have been completed, providing timely publication and convenient access.

Archaeological documentation is in the midst of a technological shift as recording systems transition from paper-based forms to digital formats. Digital systems effectively replicate the information recorded on paper forms, while also offering recording advantages for archaeologists in the field. In addition to such logistical contributions to archaeological workflows, digital technology also has tremendous potential to transform the ways that archaeology is done by shifting how we see our sites, and how we document them through diverse data types. With the goal of exploring this potential, we developed a tablet-based relational database, using FileMaker, which provides the ability to simultaneously record specific characteristics of artifacts and features according to two cultural perspectives—modern archaeological understandings and also those of the Classic Maya. In this article, we describe the database and discuss the results of a pilot field season using the database to record excavations at the site of Say Kah, Belize. Our experiences yield several broader reflections on the impact of using digital recording systems both for practical advantage and for productive shifts in perception.

La documentación arqueológica se encuentra en medio de un cambio tecnológico mediante el cual los sistemas de registro cambian del papel a formatos digitales. Los sistemas digitales replican de manera efectiva la información registrada en formularios de papel, y también ofrecen ventajas para los arqueólogos trabajando en el campo. Además de las contribuciones logísticas al trabajo arqueológico, la tecnología digital también puede transformar las formas de realizar la arqueología al cambiar la manera en que miramos los sitios, y cómo los documentamos a través de diversos tipos de datos. Con el objetivo de explorar este potencial, desarrollamos una base de datos relacional utilizando las computadoras tabletas, y el programa FileMaker, el cual ofrece la posibilidad de documentar simultáneamente características específicas de los artefactos y rasgos según dos perspectivas culturales, los entendimientos modernos de los arqueólogos y también los de los mayas clásicos. En este artículo se describe la base de datos y se discuten los resultados de la primera temporada de campo en que se utiliza la base de datos para registrar excavaciones en el sitio de Say Kah, Belice. Nuestras experiencias generan reflexiones sobre el impacto del uso de sistemas de registro digital tanto como ventajas prácticas y también para los cambios productivos en la percepción.

The Archaeological Map of the Czech Republic information system has been conceived as the backbone infrastructure of Czech archaeology. It combines a branch administrative application designed for archaeological fieldwork management with the comprehensive administration of the fieldwork results, including retrospective archaeological data collected since the late 19th century. The AMCR system works with a dynamic model of archaeological knowledge formation and is designed to hold the evidence from various phases of fieldwork activities: from research project articulation, through the description of archaeological fieldwork activities up to the analysis of their results and their linking to field documentation metadata.
The AMCR contains a register of planned archaeological interventions and follows their progress to the submission of final information on their results within the excavation report.
It creates an authority file of “fieldwork events” and gives them unique and persistent identifiers on which additional information can be bound, e.g. field documentation, bibliographic entries or even finds in museum collections. Links between authority records of various contents produce a complex network of specialized information.
Besides its administrative function, the AMCR also aspires to play the role of a “national” archaeological database. With this intention in mind, the re-examination of the majority of existing data was carried out within the framework of the AMCR project, and these data were included in the authority list of fieldwork events and “sites”. Records that have not been edited thus far and records of events that have not yet appeared in the database can be entered and edited by users in the future. Today, this form of crowdsourcing seems to be the only
viable way to sort out the huge amount of data that have been collected (but not revised and gathered in one place) in the course of the 150 years of Czech archaeology. While the volume
of data grows each year, data continues to be unnecessarily lost – if they are not properly registered, structured and stored within an information system. Among other positive effects, cooperation on the creation and management of the common information system could reinforce integration in the Czech archaeological community.
The AMCR client interface is distributed as a desktop application. It can be downloaded for free at http://www.archeologickamapa.cz. After installation, the users gain access to data at a basic level, which can be further expanded by setting up a user account and acquiring higher
user rights.

Documents written in cuneiform script are one of the largest sources about ancient history. The script is written by imprinting wedges (Latin: cunei) into clay tablets and was used for almost four millennia. This three-dimensional script is typically transcribed by hand with ink on paper. These transcriptions are available in large quantities as raster graphics by online sources like the Cuneiform Database Library Initative (CDLI). Virtually all cuneiform databases cannot be searched graphically using a cuneiform character as a query. We present a framework for a large-scale and segmentation-free search of cuneiform characters. We build upon our previous work, i.e. extracting features from cuneiform, to cluster constellations of wedges. We describe cuneiform tablets in terms of spatial n-grams to efficiently query which locations in a tablet contain all n-grams of a query. These locations are used to perform an exact matching. We provide preliminary results in form of exemplary query results to show the viability of our method.