About this book

The study of geographical information systems (GIS) has now matured to the point where non-specialists can take advantage of relatively user-friendly software to help them solve real archaeological problems. No longer is it the preserve of experts who – in the eyes of cynics – chose their archaeological case studies solely to illustrate solutions to GIS problems. This is, of course, a good thing, because GIS has so much to offer archaeology. Nevertheless, the widespread adoption of GIS brings with it several attendant dangers. The most problematic is that modern GIS packages offer users a variety of powerful tools that are easily applied, without providing much guidance on their appropriateness for the data or questions at hand. For example, many current GIS software packages require just a few mouse clicks to create an elevation model from a set of contour lines, but none that we know of would warn that the application of this method to widely spaced contours is likely to produce highly unsatisfactory results that could lead to a host of interpretative errors further down the line. Conversely, there is a risk that researchers who become overdependent on the data management abilities of GIS may shy away from tackling more analytical questions simply because it is not immediately obvious which buttons to push. It is our ambition that no archaeologist who keeps this manual near his or her computer will make such mistakes, nor be hesitant about tackling the sorts of questions that can only be answered with some of the more advanced tools that GIS packages offer.