|
GIS Guide to Good Practice |
|
2.5 Current concerns
2.5.1 Theory
A more recent consideration is that meaning is culturally embedded
within a landscape (Tilley 1994)
and simply identifying intervisibility
between monuments and places does not constitute explanation.
Meaning is a multi-faceted, qualitative, measure that cannot be
reached with purely quantitative tools such as GIS. This argues
for the application of the technology to be theory-driven rather
than data-driven as is often the case, and as part of this ongoing
debate there have been two recent and quite different approaches.
Llobera (1996) has
attempted to formalise various indices of landscape
topography and perception by writing new routines within a raster
environment, in effect introducing formal methods which are embedded
within a social theory of being in the landscape and of the humanisation
of space. The other work, while rooted in much of the same theory
(Gillings and Goodrick 1996),
proposes a more phenomenological
approach integrating Virtual Reality modelling with GIS, thus emphasising
the importance of engagement with a locale through experiential
analysis. Several other themes worth mentioning are concerned with the technology
of GIS, its application and functionality rather than application-specific
case studies. Temporality and 3-dimensional GIS are areas
that have seen relatively little work in archaeology although
the early paper on archaeology, time and GIS by Castleford (1992)
is still important and Harris and Lock (1996) demonstrate the potential of fully functional 3D GIS using a voxel data structure
for spatio-temporal modelling of excavation data. Other topics
of interest are alternative data structures (Ruggles 1992), the
importance of perception surfaces, effort surfaces and time surfaces
(Stead 1995), modelling ecological change
(Verhagen 1996; Gillings
1995) and the potential of neural networks (
Claxton 1995). While there is considerable use of CAD for excavation recording
and processing there is very little application of GIS, a topic
which will be discussed in detail in the context of another ADS Guide to Good Practice. Powlesland
has been a champion of integrated on-site digital recording and
analysis for many years and has developed his own software (Lyall
and Powlesland 1996), as has Arroyo-Bishop (Arroyo-Bishop and Lantada Zarzosa 1995). Conversely, though, Biswell et al.
(1995)
discuss the severe limitations of modern commercial archaeology
in terms of integrating GIS into existing working practices while
at the same time demonstrating its potential with a series of
intra-site spatial analyses that highlight the difference between
CAD and GIS.
|
The right of Mark Gillings, Peter Halls, Gary Lock, Paul Miller, Greg Phillips, Nick Ryan, David Wheatley, and Alicia Wise to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All material supplied via the Arts and Humanities Data Service is protected by copyright, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of it is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your personal research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. Permission for any other use must be obtained from the Arts and Humanities Data Service(info@ahds.ac.uk). Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise, to any third party.
|