ABSTRACT
Much has been written in the last 15 years about the application of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to archaeology (a good recent summary can be found in Wheatley and Gillings, 2002). As with many new concepts which achieve rapid popularity (in their discussion, at least, if not in their use) there has grown to be a degree of difference in the way the three-letter-acronym ‘GIS’ is employed. Some people consider themselves to be ‘using GIS’ if they are running a software package which calls itself GIS (as many of them do, including those of major companies), whatever they may be using the system for. Others would wish to make a distinction between ‘mapping’ or ‘cartography’ and ‘GIS’, seeing the latter as necessarily involving some sort of spatial analysis and the creation of new sets of data from those which have been imported into the system in their existing form. Examples of this kind of analysis might range from determining the average distance from stone circles to sources of water, to relatively complex statistical considerations of the visibility characteristics of archaeological sites, such as the work on long barrows carried out by Wheatley (1995) or that on mesolithic sites by Lake and Woodman (2000). Some teachers of cartography have complained that the rapid adoption of GIS software has led to a decrease in the quality of maps generated by students who are faced with too much choice and complexity, and forget that simplicity may be an aid to communication (‘Give students 40 text fonts and they’ll use them all on the same page’ one such teacher was heard to complain at a GIS conference in the 1990s). Sometimes complexity is entirely justified. The analysis of earthworks at Stapely Hill by Fletcher and Spicer (1992) was an elegant model of how this kind of work might be developed (although seldom emulated), but understanding the results requires a high level of understanding on the part of the reader. In most cases, when displaying archaeological information we are looking for something which will communicate rapidly and effectively with the viewer.
