Internet Archaeology 21

This article has been written in reaction to recent developments in medieval history and archaeology, to study not only the buildings in a town but also the spaces that hold them together. It discusses a more objective and interdisciplinary approach for analysing urban morphology and use of space. It proposes a 'new' methodology by combining town plan analysis and space syntax. This methodology was trialled on the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. By comparing the results of this 'new' methodology with the results of previous, more conventional, research, this article shows that space syntax can be applied successfully to medieval urban contexts. It does this by demonstrating a strong correlation between medieval economic spaces and the most integrated spaces, just as is found in the study of modern urban environments. It thus provides a strong basis for the use of this technique in future research of medieval urban environments.

Portable antiquities (sometimes known as small finds or chance finds) are often recorded within most Historic Environment Records to a spurious level of precision. For example, finds located only within a parish, or general area, are often mapped within GIS systems to exact points. Similarly, finds known only to the nearest kilometre square are usually mapped in the bottom left-hand corner of the square in GIS. While such mappings can be taken into account to some extent when trying to assess the archaeological potential of an area, the degree to which the records may give distorted views of the archaeological potential of an area may not be fully appreciated. This may mean that the full archaeological impacts of development may not be taken into account during development control decision making.This article looks at an alternative method for mapping such finds in order to produce an Artefact Density Index for areas, which more usefully reflects the pattern of activities across the landscape. The Artefact Density Index (ADI) was divided to reflect broad archaeological periods (e.g. Roman, medieval etc.), as well as broad artefact types (e.g. weapons, tools etc.). The ADI was based on combining weighted values for finds types, with the weight reflecting the precision of the location of the finds (i.e. finds recorded only at parish level will be given less weight than those recorded more precisely). An ADI was developed for a sub-area of the North Yorkshire County Council HER area, and also incorporated data from the Portable Antiquities scheme as a case study for the project.

The development of an urban property in the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester, Hampshire, England) is traced from the late first to the mid-third century AD. Three successive periods of building, with their associated finds of artefacts and biological remains, are described and interpreted with provisional reconstructions of the buildings. Links are provided to a copy of the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB), archived by the Archaeology Data Service, which holds the primary excavation and finds records: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/archive/silchester_ahrc_2007/

In this article we present the Faceted Query Engine, a system developed at Columbia University under the aegis of the inter-disciplinary project Computational Tools for Modeling, Visualizing and Analyzing Historic and Archaeological Sites. Our system is based on novel Database Systems research that has been published in Computer Science venues (Ross and Janevski, 2004 and Ross et al., 2005). The goal of this article is to introduce our system to the target user audience - the archaeology community.We demonstrate the use of the Faceted Query Engine on a previously unpublished dataset: the Thulamela (South Africa) collection. This dataset is comprised of iron-age finds from the Thulamela site at the Kruger National Park. Our project is the first to systematically compile and classify this dataset. We also use a larger dataset, a collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts from the Memphis site (Giddy,1999), to demonstrate some of the features of our system.

Informing the Future of the Past: Guidelines for Historic Environment Records (second) edition is billed as the 'New and improved manual that empowers HER managers to realise the full potential of their records as information systems for the historic environment'. It is a worthy, and ambitious, declaration. It is also timely, as HER services prepare for another important phase of evolution.