Incorporating GIS Methodological Approaches in Heritage Management Projects

Abstract

There has been a long-standing debate in academic archaeology on how to study the surface archaeological record. The debate has centered around whether to interpret the record as consisting of discrete sites and isolates or as continuous distributions of artifacts, features, and deposits. Historic preservation laws, however, focus on discrete sites as the properties that need to be discovered, recorded, and evaluated. As more research is done within a heritage management framework, the outcome has been to focus on the site as the unit of analysis almost to the exclusion of the study of spatial behaviours that transcend discrete sites. To achieve the objectives of heritage preservation and to examine spatial human behaviour that is unconstrained by the site concept, new methodologies are needed. As a move in this direction we use GIS to create hypothetical archaeological landscapes based on assumptions of human behaviour that can be tested and refined with survey and excavation data. In this process we collect detailed surface data that GIS algorithms use to define discrete sites and, at the same time, to analyze continuous distributions of cultural materials. We illustrate this approach with a several examples from North America and West Africa using different field methodologies.