ABSTRACT
Applications of geographic information systems (GIS) in archaeology may be nearly a decade old, or perhaps a decade and a half, depending on how one defines GIS. Actual use of the term in archaeology begins to appear with regularity around 1983-85, but there are strong antecedents in related technologies that go back to the late 1970s on both sides of the Atlantic. The earliest applications akin to GIS clearly lie in computer graphics and statistics. Trend-surface analysis, borrowed from geology, has surprisingly numerous applications from 1975 through the early 1980s. The application and use of digital elevation models of study region surfaces came quite early in the USA with the work of Scheitlin and Clark, Arnold, Green and Stewart, Kvamme and others. The computer simulation work of Zimmerman in the midwestern USA, and Chadwick in Greece, provides another source of GIS precursors.
