Best Practices Of Geoinformatic Technologies For The Mapping Of Archaeolandscapes

Twenty-five papers from the Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Crete provide a best practice guide for the use of geophysical, geoarchaeological, geochemical and surveying techniques to study ancient landscapes.

Heritage science, a cross-disciplinary field of study that emphasizes research on cultural interpretation and management, has seen significant development in recent years. Modern technology has opened new innovations and possibilities for scientific cooperation that produces several benefits that affect multiple aspects of this scientific field. Applying Innovative Technologies in Heritage Science is a collection of progressive studies on the methods and applications of the technological implications and scientific advancements within heritage and cultural research to bridge the once unbridgeable gap between science and humanities. While highlighting topics including digital archives, cultural data, and chemical documentation, this book is ideally designed for archaeologists, museologists, conservationists, preservationists, librarians, researchers, educators, cultural heritage professionals, academicians, and students.

The Proceedings of 12th International Conference of Archaeological Prospection draws together over 100 papers addressing archaeological prospection techniques, methodologies and case studies from around the world.

Bringing together a wide array of modern scientific techniques and interdisciplinary approaches, this book provides an accessible guide to the methods that form the current bedrock of research into Roman, and more broadly ancient, wine. Chapters are arranged into thematic sections, covering biomolecular archaeology and chemical analysis, archaeobotany and palynology, vineyard and landscape archaeology and computational and experimental archaeology. These include discussions of some of the most recent techniques, such as ancient DNA and organic residue analyses, geophysical prospection, multispectral imaging and spatial and climatic modelling. While most of the content is of direct relevance to the Roman Mediterranean, the assortment of detailed case studies, methodological outlines and broader 'state of the field' reflections is of equal use to researchers working across disparate disciplines, geographies, and chronologies. The study of ancient Roman wine has been dominated until recently by traditional archaeological analyses focused upon production facilities and ceramic evidence related to transport. While such architecture and artefact-focussed approaches provide a fundamental foundation for our understanding of this topic, they fail to provide the requisite nuance to answer other questions regarding grape cultivation and wine production, consumption, use and trade. As the first compendium of its kind, this book supports the embedding of modern scientific and experimental techniques into archaeological fieldwork, research and laboratory analysis, pushing the boundaries of what questions can be explored, and serving as a launching point for future avenues of interdisciplinary research.

This volume brings together all the successful peer-reviewed papers submitted for the proceedings of the 43rd conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology that took place in Siena (Italy) from March 31st to April 2nd 2015.

New Directions and Paradigms for the Study of Greek Architecture collects chapters by nearly three dozen scholars who describe recent discoveries, new theoretical frameworks, and applications of cutting-edge techniques in their architectural research.

This book charts and explains how human activities have shaped and altered the development of soils in many parts of the world, taking advantage of five decades of soil analytical work in many archaeological landscapes from around the globe. The core of this volume describes and illustrates major transformations of soils and the processes involved in these that have occurred during the Holocene and how these relate to human activities as much as natural causes and trajectories of development, right up to the present day. This is done in two ways: first by examining a number of major processes and impacts on the landscape such as Holocene warming and the development of woodland, clearance and agricultural activities, and second by examining the trajectories of these changes in soil systems in different palaeo-environmental situations in several diverse parts of the world. The transformations identified are relevant to prevalent themes of today such as over-development and soil, land and environmental degradation and resilience. The studies articulated relate to Britain, southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, East Africa, northern India and Peru in South America.

This book describes a novel machine-learning based approach to answer some traditional archaeological problems, relating to archaeological site detection and site locational preferences. Institutional data collected from six Swiss regions (Zurich, Aargau, Grisons, Vaud, Geneva and Fribourg) have been analyzed with an original conceptual framework based on the Random Forest algorithm. It is shown how the algorithm can assist in the modelling process in connection with heterogeneous, incomplete archaeological datasets and related cultural heritage information. Moreover, an in-depth review of past and more recent works of quantitative methods for archaeological predictive modelling is provided. The book guides the readers to set up their own protocol for: i) dealing with uncertain data, ii) predicting archaeological site location, iii) establishing environmental features importance, iv) and suggest a model validation procedure. It addresses both academics and professionals in archaeology and cultural heritage management, and offers a source of inspiration for future research directions in the field of digital humanities and computational archaeology.