GIS in Cultural Resources and Historic Preservation

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GIS in Cultural Resources and Historic
Preservation
Dr. Kathy Moffitt Interdisciplinary Spatial
Information Systems Center Professor, Information
Systems
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GIS allows you to relate things on the basis of
where they exist on the ground.

• Change the layers and the pattern changes

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• Goal
• to understand the spatial and temporal dimensions
  of a very large complex of rock art, in terms of
  the geographical features and processes which
  would have helped to shape ancient societies

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Viewshed from West Ritual Site

• Ground truthed by actual observation

• Viewshed analysis shows
• areas of a surface that can be seen by one or
  more observers, and
• for any visible position, how many observers can
  see the position. The result is a grid theme with
  visibility attributes assigned to every cell. The
  assigned values are the number of observation
  points from which a particular location can be
  seen.

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Using GIS at Mission San Luis Rey
Staff now accommodate utility location,
groundskeeping, and facility improve-ments needs
while maintaining the historic character of
Mission San Luis Rey
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Geotechnologies Used to Speed the Search for
Mayan Sites

• Satellite Imagery
• Digital Image Processing
• Global Positioning Systems
• Hypotheses
• able to detect sites by bump in canopy and
• thinner soil leading to less vigorous vegetation
• Led to identification of Wakna and other sites

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• Historical events unfold against a backdrop of
  geography, time and the human cultural matrix.
• Most approaches to recording cultural data tend
  to be the product of local interests, specific
  research or administrative imperatives.
• This isolates cultural data from one-another and
  from the broader context of geography and human
  history, limiting their value for education,
  cultural understanding and exchange

TimeMap Project, Archaeological Computing
Laboratory, University of Sydney
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Extent of Mongol Empire at time of collapse of
Yuan Dynasty A.D. 1360

• A centralized database server which indexes,
  describes and stores cultural datasets relevant
  to a particular place, time or thematic interest.

• The maps integrate data from datasets which may
  never have been collected with integration in
  mind.

• This allows researchers to drill down into the
  data and integrate results from data from
  different datasets.