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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.