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Scientific Programme
Invited talk: Caitlin E. Buck

Out of Asia: A New Framework for Dating the Spread of Agriculture in Europe

The switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most significant economic and social changes in human history.  As part of an NERC funded collaborative project, staff at the University of Sheffield are directly dating the earliest cereals found on Neolithic sites across Europe and developing a tailored Bayesian statistical framework for their interpretation.  The statistical aspects of this work will be discussed at CAA2010.

The new framework allows incorporation of a large number of radiocarbon dates for cereals, takes account of the uncertainties associated with the radiocarbon dates, and provides a powerful tool for testing hypotheses concerning agricultural spread. It is constructed around a network-based space-time model.  The nodes in the network represent sites, of statistical and geographic importance, and edges indicate major corridors or geographical boundaries of unfavorable areas. The first arrival time at each node is estimated as a function of the network. The method used breaks down the estimation of the first arrival time into spread times along edges, thus explicitly disentangling the spatial dependence of the arrival time among neighboring sites and allowing geographic information and environmental conditions to enter as priors. AT CAA2010, preliminary results will be presented which show that the new model can provide reduced uncertainty on estimates of arrival times for nodes where data are available and make predictions (with clear uncertainty statements) about arrival times at the others.


Caitlin E. BuckCaitlin E. Buck holds a personal chair in the Department of Probability and Statistics of the University of Sheffield. Her primary research area is the development of modern statistical methods for archaeological, palaeoenvironmental and chronometric research. She has published in highly-regarded journals in statistics (e.g. Applied Statistics and Bayesian Analysis), chronometrics (e.g. Radiocarbon), palaeoenvironment (e.g.The Holocene and Quaternary Science Reviews) and archaeology (e.g. Antiquity).

She was PI on the project that developed BCal: an on-line Bayesian radiocarbon calibration service.

She is currently working on:

  • chronology building as applied to studies of environmental change; particularly climate change as evidenced in long records such as ice cores,
  • the dating of human population movements; both at the Pleistocene to Holocene transition and for understanding how and when modern farming practices arrived in Europe.
  • models and methods for estimating radiocarbon
  • elicitation of expert prior probabilities.
 
Invited talk: Javier Baena

Gis Application to Archaeology: a critical view from a Spanish perspective

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Javier BaenaJavier Banea leads the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM).

He is currently engaged in research projects concerned with experimental archaeology, lithic technology and GIS and its application to Prehistory and Archaeology.

He has published published around one hundred papers in international and national conferences and is invited senior fellow at different spanish universities. He has also been involved in several courses and seminars in universities from Spain, Portugal, Italy and USA.

Abstract

In this contribution, we’ll try to present a general view of the state of GIS application to Archaeology in our country, pointing out the benefits and limitations of two decades of Spanish experiences.

For several decades, GIS application development has had an important impact in the Archaeology and Prehistory of our country. Spain has been one of the pioneers in developing applications with this methodologies circumstance that provide a scenario of its recent evolution. Starting with a wide spread of Heritage management applications in the 90ths follows the wave of countries like Holland, UK, France and Italy among others. This first phase had good examples in the macro and meso-scales.

However, the application of these technologies to Archaeology has shown several limitations. In terms of scales, the application to micro scales is very rare, with the dominance of visibility applications, site catchment analysis, and overlay analysis in wide areas.

At the same time, chronological applications generally are focused in recent periods due to the limitations of Paleo-geographical reconstructions, and limitations in GIS skills abilities, caused by a slow introduction of Geographical technologies in Archaeological educational programs.

Another aspect is the limitation in statistical application to GIS results. Usually, GIS applications are use in cartographic presentation with a clear visualization aim. The employ of statistics is limited to few projects developed in a raster context.

Finally, the use of vector, and in less proportion, raster models projects has produced the lost in the interest in Object Oriented GIS research. This “lazy GIS” spirit is very well detected in the last 10 year applications in our country.
 
Invited talk: Roberto Scopigno

Visualization of CH Models: Seeking for Just Visual Quality or Also Informative Content?

Abstract

Detailed and accurate 3D models of Cultural Heritage artifacts are becoming widely available by the diffusion of several new technologies for sem-automatic 3D digitalization. Very dense models require efficient data representations to be rendered in real time (either locally or on the web).

The talk will present current multiresolution approaches for efficient CH data representation and visualization, focusing on both triangle-based and point-based solutions which allow to enconde geometry and color data in a visualization-efficient manner.

But efficiency and visual quality of the visualization are not enough. Another emerging issue is how to enhance the interactive presentation of the artifact with capabilities that allow us to present also all the prossible related meta-information. User are thus looking for technologies able to geo-reference and annotate any type of information on the digital skin of the artwork. Recent efforts in this direction will be presented and discussed.


Roberto ScopignoRoberto Scopigno is a Research Director at ISTI-CNR, an Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). He leads the Visual Computing Lab of ISTI-CNR.

He is currently engaged in research projects concerned with multiresolution data modeling and rendering, 3D scanning, surface reconstruction, scientific visualization and applications to Cultural Heritage. Most of these activities have been funded by EU grants.

He published more than one hundred fifty papers in international refereed journals/conferences and gave invited lectures or courses at several international conferences.

He was Co-Chair of international conferences (Eurographics 1999, Rendering Symposium 2002, WSCG 2004, Geometry Processing Symp. 2004, Eurographics 2008).

Since 2001 he is Co-Editor in Chief of the Computer Graphics Forum Journal. He has been elected member of the Eurographics Executive Committee on 2001, and appointed Chair of the association in 2009.