Phil Buckland will give a lecture “Understanding past environments through digital environmental archaeology” on Monday, February 26 from 13-15, in R-218, Hulda Garborgs hus, University of Stavanger, in the Greenhouse speaker series. All are welcome!
Environmental archaeology deals with the reconstruction of past environments and climates through the interpretation of proxy indicators such as fossil plant and insect remains. Most often, these reconstructions take the form of a written narrative, describing the past in terms of equivalent modern or historical landscape components or anthropogenic environments. However, there are always data behind these narratives, and quantitative reconstructions, using simple statistics and graphics to summarise the key aspects of the implications of the fossils are common in both environmental archaeology and its more natural science orientated cousin Quaternary science. When these raw data are collated into large databases, the possibilities for making large-scale, inter-site and inter-subject inferences and comparisons become considerable. Similarly, the challenges of making intuitive data exploration systems and visualizations interfaces grow massively. This presentation will explain all of the above, and present some ongoing work on research data infrastructures for environmental archaeology and Quaternary Science. It will also present some interesting developments in the use of the semantic web to link these data to information as diverse as Icelandic sagas and land ownership records, in an attempt to provide tools for a more holistic interrogation of the past. This is digital environmental archaeology.
Phil Buckland is associate professor of archaeology at Umeå University, where he is the director of The Environmental Archaeology Lab (MAL). He also runs the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD) project, a national and international research infrastructure for data from the application of scientific methods in archaeology.
