Case study: mapping for archaeology
Our first CartoDB workshop for the year was attended by a group of postgraduate students from archaeology and we were pretty excited when Emily Poelina-Hunter agreed to come back and share her research (and maps) with a later workshop.
Emily is researching prehistoric figurines from the Aegean, specifically those from the Cycladic islands of Greece. There’s a lot of debate about where the people who colonised the Cycladic Islands around 4500 BCE came from, and some scholars think they came from Anatolia (modern Turkey). Emily is studying the figurines and comparing them with examples from the mainland, to see what they can add to our understanding of how the islands were colonised. In particular, she’s interested in testing the hypothesis that the colonists were people who lived on the coast of Anatolia and sailed out to the islands.
An example of a Cycladic figurine from the early Bronze Age, now held in the Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany
For the purposes of Emily’s research, she needs to be able to identify where the figurines were found, both on the Cycladic islands and on the mainland. CartoDB is really good at plotting geo-referenced points, which means that it can show find-spots of artifacts once the data is in the right format. Emily used a combination of Google maps and excavation reports to create a list of locations to put onto her map. Getting accurate geo-references for ancient sites isn’t always easy, and in some cases it was more accurate to add points manually to the map. After a bit of work, Emily had her sites mapped.
Points and zones: the data that Emily needed to get onto a single map
But sometimes researchers need more than ‘dots on a map’. An earlier researcher had shown that particular regions in Anatolia had distinct figurine types and had identified a number of ‘zones’. Emily (with some help from Steve) created a new layer in her CartoDB map where she added these zones as polygons. By combining the two layers of data (one with the points, the other with the polygons), she could now show clearly how the individual sites fell into zones. CartoBD also lets you create labels, which makes the map even easier to understand.
Interestingly, Emily has found that the figurines that most resemble the ones found on the islands aren’t from the coastal zone – they come from further inland. This suggests that the islands weren’t simply colonised by people from the coastal settlements.
Emily’s map, created with CartoBD, shows both sites and zones
While getting all the data into the right format and creating a visualisation does take a bit of effort, we think it’s worth it. The ability to create accurate, customised and professional-looking maps makes a huge difference to how researchers can to present their findings. Trying to use a tool like PowerPoint to edit someone else’s map tends to produce a messy result and doesn’t produce something you can publish. With CartoDB, it’s straightforward to embed a map in a website or include static images in presentations and publications. Emily now plans to use her maps in her thesis and in a forthcoming article deriving from her doctoral research. ITS Research is proud to have helped out along the way.
