Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

Once in a while, Oxford Archaeology get called upon to do some really big archaeological projects, like road schemes and airport expansion, that cover huge areas, go on for years, and generate loads of data. We love these, because it’s not very often that you get to look at whole landscapes- how multiple prehistoric villages interact, for example, rather than tantalising snapshots where you have to play “join the dots”.

Not only do we generate loads of data (thousands of artefacts, records, environmental samples, photos etc), but we ask difficult questions of them, based on statistical analysis of finds distribution, travelling salesman algorithms, best-path analysis. I think you can call this “real GIS”, though often people are surprised to hear that archaeologists use GIS at all.

As part of our ongoing “open approach“, and to prove that we put our money where our mouth is, we are now trying to do all of this in open source software rather than using the “standard” proprietary packages.  I’ve blogged previously about how pleased I was with the integration between QGIS and PostgreSQL, and how easy it was to manage large amounts of data without regress to proprietary packages, well  our current large project needs 3D analysis and large amounts of imagery manipulation, and again we’re finding that the open source tools out there do the job splendidly. Furthermore, we have a choice of tools, so if one approach doesn’t quite work the way we expect or want, then we can choose another. Now that can’t be bad, can it?

So, in brief, we’re using Quantum GIS and GvSIG pretty much interchangeably for our desktop GIS. All the vector data is in PostgreSQL. We use the QGIS Grass plugin to get data into a sensible format for 3D display and analysis in Paraview and Visit. We’re mosaicing up aerial photos using GDAL tools, and using Geoserver to publish everything to people who just need read-only access, and a direct connection to PostgreSQL for those that need to edit. We’ve developed a workflow for creating high-quality cartographic output by exporting to Inkscape, and the next step is a project website with links to our database and a nice openlayers map. Simples!

I went to the Open Knowledge Foundation conference, OKCON in London a few weeks ago, and have been meaning do a review of it ever since. Whilst little of what I saw had a direct relevance to what I do, it was invigorating to be in a room with a whole bunch of people with imagination, who believe knowledge should be free to anyone, and who basically like to disrupt the status quo.

A few quotes:

[2009 was] the year open data went mainstream (Rufus Pollock)

The threat [to the record industry] is not piracy, but obscurity (Glynn Moody)

What would happen if every school had a reprap? (Ben O’Steen)

One paper that was quite relevant to me was “Dig the new breed” by Anthony Beck, about opening up archaeological data. There are related articles and mailing list posts here and here. I feel uneasy about some of the details (it’s not lethargy or ethics that dictates the data we do or don’t release, it’s money) but in general it’s a no-brainer. We’re doing our bit with our Eprints library, but we’re at an early stage with getting reports on there.

The only problem I see is figuring out who to lobby- I would add the developers and the county-level curators to the list as well as the actual archaeological units. I know of specific cases where developers would not provide the money for making the results of an excavation public access, and also where a regional Historic Environment Record would not allow “their” data to be shown on a web map.

Otherwise, I particularly enjoyed Glynn Moody’s paper on The Post-Analogue World- focussing on the “plight” of the record industry, struggling to cope with the transition from analogue to digital, and Ben O’Steen’s paper on Making the Physical from the Digital. Bookbinding, repraps, MP’s expenses and Cory Doctorow all in one talk. Can’t be bad!

Many of the talks are available to download here, and OKFN have working groups for both archaeology and geospatial data if you’re interested. I hope to have more involvement with both, and to investigate links between OKFN and OSGeo, now I have some time and mental space. More to come…

Making History, on BBC Radio 4, had an article yesterday on the plight of commercial archaeology in UK during the recession. It made for some sobering listening.

To understand what all the fuss is about, you need to get over the idea that archaeologists are all volunteers, either school kids or retired, or perhaps have a nice research job in a University. Some are, and some do, but there’s a whole bunch of others who are trying to make a living from archaeology, in the same way that they would with any other job.

So, the Institute for Archaeologists, the professional body for archaeologists in the UK, have been profiling the profession since 2002, looking at the number of practising archaeologists, the average wage, etc. In 2007, at the peak of the housing boom, there were 7000 practising archaeologists, of which approx 4000 were working in commercial archaeology, with the rest working in academia or part of the planning team in councils. Since then, nearly 700 jobs have been lost, equating to 10% of that all-time high, and it’s fair to say that there will have been more losses in the commercial sector than in academia or councils. On the radio show yesterday they were suggesting up to 1 in 5 commercial archaeologists but I can’t find any figures to back that up.

The reason for this downturn is that commercial archaeology is now tied so tightly into the planning regime in the UK, and is funded almost entirely by developers, so if there is no building work going on, then there is no archaeology being done…

Hopefully things will start picking up as the government try and inject stimulus money into infrastructure, but it’s going to be a difficult year for everyone.

…Actually no one who commented on last week’s post, though thanks for all the great suggestions!

In the end we went for ZooOS, suggested by Jeremy Ottevanger on the Antiquist Mailing List (though the capitalisation is all ours). We like it because it’s got mixed etymological roots, coming from both Greek (zoo =  greek for animals) and Roman (os = bone in latin) but also because it has that essential Open Source ring to it. It’s pronounced “zeus” by the way…

Now we have a name, we also have a launchpad site!

Thanks again for all the suggestions- we think we might borrow one or two of them for other projects, so watch this space!