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Annual Meeting |
Twenty-three posters were submitted for the 2004 Annual Meeting's Poster Session. The poster competition judges, David Gilman Romano, University of Pennsylvania, Ruth Tringham, University of California at Berkeley, and James Wiseman, Boston University, examined all of the posters and judged "CGMA: Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology" as the best poster. The poster was presented by Rebecca Schindler and Pedar Foss of DePauw University. Poster Abstract Millions of hectares across the Mediterranean have undergone some kind of archaeological survey; hundreds of projects have been initiated. Technological advances in collection, storage, and analysis have produced immense quantities of data. One of the most important of these advances has been GIS (Geographic Information Systems), which permits the cartographic presentation and analysis of data with a spatial dimension. Yet no count has ever been made, nor has any catalog been compiled of exactly what geographic areas, chronological periods, methodologies, or research questions have been investigated by Mediterranean survey projects. The CGMA Project (Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology), with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, seeks to fill that gap by building the first Mediterranean-wide GIS for archaeology. In CGMA's first phase, we are collecting metadata about archaeological surveys in the Mediterranean. This data is then shared over an Internet GIS, which is being built through the collaboration of faculty and students at four liberal arts colleges. CGMA introduces a functional framework for broad studies of the interactions of humans and their environment in antiquity by archaeologists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. As the database of survey projects grows, we can begin to know how much data exists, and the various ways in which they are categorized and formatted. Ultimately, we can consider problems of data comparability amongst survey projects included in the CGMA GIS. This poster describes CGMA's purpose and potential, and demonstrates its current progress. |
