Spatial analysis is central to the field of archaeology, making GIS an extremely useful tool in the field today. Geographic mapping can be used for everything from surveying for new excavation sites, to analyzing depositional patterns, to cataloging artifacts and analyzing the spatial relationships between them. As a student of archaeology, this is exactly why I decided to learn GIS, so it’s really exciting that I now have the opportunity to apply my newly developed (or rather, developing) knowledge of this technology to my field of study. Esteban Gomez recently took a class to Costa Rica, where they used a Total Station to record geographic coordinates of elevations at the site, as well as artifacts and points of interest. My new job is to transcribe this data into Excel, reorganize it, and then create a topographic map of the two excavation sites. At this point, it’s still a lot of mindless data entry (there are two field notebooks full of coordinates to be entered into Excel), but I’ll be keeping you posted on the development of this project as it gets a bit more interesting.
Also, in my last post I referenced a great video on the complexities of creating a two dimensional map of the globe. Here it is:
http://www3.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/films/film.php?sort=title&id=14229
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