Ain Khadra
Amir Ebrahim Elkorashy explores an archaeological landscape around a spring in the Western Desert.
spatial analysis
Reassembling Tutankhamun’s Tomb
The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 produced one of the most detailed archaeological archives ever created. Daniela Rosenow describes a new digital platform, the Tutankhamun Spatial Archive, developed by the University of Oxford’s Griffith Institute, which brings together this vast body of records, allowing researchers and the public alike to explore the tomb, its contents, and its excavation in entirely new ways.
Digital data: Fishbourne Roman Palace
When it was excavated in the 1960s, Fishbourne Roman Palace generated an archive that, for the time, was incredibly structured and detailed. However, by today’s standards, little attention was given to distribution of artefacts across the site, or relative locations…
Stonehenge: Sighting the Sun
REVIEW BY ROB IXER This is the second of two recent, non-mainstream Stonehenge books (the other is Mike Pitts’ publication on the technicalities of building the circle), both of which must be on the required reading list for this monument.…
Exploring tomb distribution in Upper Qurna
Katherine Slinger searches for patterns in the locations of private tombs on the slopes above the royal mortuary temples of Luxor.
Tomb Families: Private Tomb Distribution in the New Kingdom Theban Necropolis
Review by Campbell Price This book is the result of the very recent PhD research of Liverpool University student Katherine Slinger – so recent, in fact, that Dr Slinger graduated after the book was published, which must be some sort…
Facing the Enemy? A GIS study of 1st century Roman fortifications in the Scottish landscape
Review by Kathryn Murphy In Facing the Enemy, Andrew Tibbs presents analysis of Roman fortifications and the Scottish landscape, focusing on the positioning, intervisibility, orientation, and interconnectivity of Flavian sites. Stemming from his PhD thesis, this volume discusses one of…
Roman Rural Settlement in Wales and the Marches: approaches to settlement and material culture through big data
Review by Andrew Tibbs. A nalysis of ‘big data’ (large datasets of information) is a technique used to expose patterns for archaeologists to interpret, and it is utilised effectively in this book to undertake a detailed study of the rural…
Exploring a Roman house in VR
In order to explore how this lavish home was experienced by Roman viewers, researchers first used 3D-modelling software to create a reconstruction of the house. This 3D model was based on information from an earlier Lund University project that digitally mapped a neighbourhood in Pompeii, in combination with records from the excavation of the house and other information about Roman architecture.
Peasant Perceptions of Landscape: Ewelme hundred, south Oxfordshire, 500-1650
Review by Susan Oosthuizen. This study of 14 south Oxfordshire parishes covers the lowland valleys of both the Thame and Thames, typified by nucleated settlements and open fields, and the uplands of the Chiltern Hills, characterised by dispersed farms and…
English Landscapes and Identities: investigating landscape change from 1500 BC to AD 1086
This excellent volume addresses two key questions of archaeological research. First, can archaeology create the grand narratives practised by public historians? Second, what is the return on the long history of archaeological research, accumulating big data, often funded by the…
Ecclesiastical Landscapes in Medieval Europe: an archaeological perspective
This volume largely stems from the 2018 European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) annual meeting in Barcelona. The editors have obviously taken great care in compiling a cohesive and comprehensive collection of papers that work towards providing a new academic narrative…
Digging into databases
Arguably, one of the biggest challenges that continually faces archaeology is accessibility. While that can be interpreted in several different ways, what I’m going to concentrate on in this month’s ‘Science Notes’ is access to data. With the advent of…