ABSTRACT
At the State Service for Archaeological Investigations in The Netherlands, the Centre of Expertise ARCHIS is responsible for building and maintaining an archaeological database linked to a GIS. Apart from cultural resource management, the GIS is used for all kinds of spatial analysis. Until recently, digital maps were being used in the same way as their paper equivalents. The map units were digitized and the resulting polygons, lines and points could be used to find relations between the distribution of the points and the digitized physical environment. To overcome these limitations of ‘classical’ maps a transformation to continuous models (or ‘trend surfaces’) might be a solution. In a continuous model, each point in a map has a meaningful value, comparable to a digital elevation model, in which the value at each point represents the real elevation at that point.
