Speaker
Prof.
Pier Giovanni Pelfer
(Dept. Physics, University of Florence and INFN, Italy)
Description
Modern archaeology, between the historical, anthropological and social sciences, is
the more suitable and mature for the application of the Grid technologies. In fact,
archaeology is a multidisciplinary historical science, using data and methods from
many of the natural and social sciences. Archaeological research do and has done
large use of computers and digital technologies for data acquisition and storage,
for quantitative and qualitative data analysis, for data visualisation, for
mathematical modeling and simulation. The Web also is intensively used for results
exchange, for communication and for accessing to large database by the Web Services
technology. The interest of archaeologist for such methods is today more than a
temporal interest. There are many computational archaeologists through the world and
specialised quantitative archaeology laboratories experimenting new methods in
spatial analysis, geostatistics, geocomputation, artificial intelligence
applications to archaeology, etc.
In fact any material remains, artifacts and ecofacts, macro and microscopic, present
on the earth surface, representing the material culture of the past societies is
relevant for the archaeology, independently from its esthetical or economical
value. Remains should be described according to their basic properties (shape,
size, texture, composition, spatial and temporal location), which implies the use of
sophisticated procedures for its computer representation: 3D geometry and realistic
rendering, among them.
Furthermore, data should be related spatially and temporally in complex ways. In so
doing, an archaeological site should be understood as a complex sequence of finite
states of a spatio-temporal trajectory, where an original entity (ground surface) is
modified successively, by accumulating things on it, by deforming a previous
accumulation or by direct physical modification (building, excavation). This spatio-
temporal representation must be considered as continuum made up of discrete,
irregular, discontinuous geometrical shapes (surfaces, volumes) defined by
additional characteristics (shape, texture, composition, as dependent variables of
the model) which in turn influence the variation of every archaeological feature.
The idea is that interfacial boundaries represent successive phases, and are
dynamically constructed. Within them, there should be some statistical relationship
between the difference in value of the dependent regionalised variable which defines
the discontinuity at any pair of points and their distance apart.
The complexities of archaeological data processing are more demanding when we
consider that archaeological analysis cannot be constrained to the study of a single
site. In recent years archaeological research teams are very much interested in
doing extended projects involving the study of many different sites at very large
geographic regions during very long time spans. This work is specially relevant in
the case of the study of paleoclimatic human adaptations, hunter-gatherer societies
mobility and the study of the origins of cities and early state formation. In
these cases, archaeological data produced by excavation and field survey or
retrieved from different types of available archives, are not only huge in
quantity but also in diversity and complexity, and the computing power needed for
their analysis, simulation and visualisation is very large. The purpose is then
working towards a landscape archaeology which should reconstruct the evolution of
settlement organization on the studied region with a low or high spatio-temporal
resolution in relation with the analysed level, intersite, intrasite or regional.
For such a precise reconstruction of geomorphology, hydrology, climate, landcover
and landuse of the region, based on known data, must be done using models and
simulation. Moreover, as a social and historical science, such a simulation cannot
stops at the physical elements, but it should include the study of demographic
variation, including demographic models, settlement and urban dynamics and
production and exchange models.
All that means that archaeology is a computer intensive discipline. Model building
is time consuming and resource intensive, and archaeological data are huge. They
also are unique in character, so they cannot be substituted, because they need care
to preserve. Everything in our analysis has to be preserved and stored, but also the
information about them. The results of simulated data must be preserved for a long
time because they represent the status of the data interpretation at some date and
will be useful for future analysis.("Crisis of Curation"). For the previous reasons
the archaeology need to exploit the GRID technology for data access, storage and
management, for data analysis, for simulation, for archaeological knowledge
circulation : from WEB to GRID. ArchaeoGRID will offer the unique opportunity to
share data, processing and model building opportunities with other branches of
science and create synergy with other GRID projects.( Earth Sciences, Digital
Library, Astrophysics GRID projects, etc. )
The starting project proposes to begin with the study of the origin of the city in
Mediterranean area between XI and VIII Centuries B.C. using the GILDA t-
Infrastructure. The study will provide a functional framework for broad studies of
the interactions of humans in ancient urban societies and with the environment .
During the past fifteen years, archaeologists in the Mediterranean have accumulated
large amounts of computerized data that have remained trapped in localized and often
proprietary databases. It is now possible to change that situation. ArchaeoGRID will
be made to facilitate ways in which such data might be brought together and shared
between researchers, students, and the general public. Archaeological data always
includes an intrinsic geographic component, and the compilation and sharing of
geographic data through GIS has become increasingly important in the governmental,
private sector and academic worlds during the past years. New GRID technologies for
spatial data, expansion of the Web Services and development of open GIS
technology now make it possible to share geographic information quickly, widely and
effectively.
The first application running on the GILDA be will be related with paleoclimate and
weather simulation in the regions where the urban centers originate around the IX
and VIII centuries B.C. In fact weather phenomena, climate and climate changes
produced effects on individuals and societies in the past. In the next future,
GILDA will be used to explore the possibilities of different computational
methodologies insiting of the tools for the analysis of spatio-temporal data.
Classical statistical analysis of spatio-temporal series will be used, but also we
intend to develop new methods for the analysis of longitudinal analysis, based on
neural networks technology.
Simulation programs and data available on the web and free will be used for
application. Such data could be integrated with data from archaeological excavation
and survey. The complexity and the dimension of program code and data require the
use of MPI library for parallel calculation on GILDA computers using Linux OS.
Open source GRASS GIS and package R for statistical analysis installed on GILDA will
give the possibility to prepare the input data for the full Mediterranean area and
for the territories of the urban centers.
A schematic architecture of the ArchaeoGRID showing the relevant parts and their
links will be presented. Given the intrinsic nature of archaeological field work,
the communication and the information exchange between groups on site and groups
working in distant laboratories, museums and universities need fast and efficient
communication ways. Telearchaeology lies at the real nature of archaeological
endeavor and could be very useful also for education and for diffusion of the
archaeological knowledge. A multicast architecture for advanced videoconferencing
specially tailored for large scale persistent collaboration could be used.
The added value, linked with new perspectives of the archaeological and historical
research, with the management of the archaeological heritage, with the media
production, with the territory management and with tourism, will be discussed.
Authors
Dr
Giuliano Pelfer
(CSDC, University of Florence, Italy)
Prof.
Juan Antonio Barcelò Alvarez
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Prof.
Pier Giovanni Pelfer
(Dept. Physics, University of Florence and INFN, Italy)
Co-authors
Dr
Alfredo Maximiano Castillejo
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Dr
Andrea Toselli
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Dr
Antonio Politi
(ISC-CNR, Florence, Italy)
Dr
Assumció Vila i Mitjà
(Institució Milà i Fontanals , CSIC, Barcelona, Spain)
Dr
Igor Bogdanovic
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Dr
Jordi Estevez Escalera
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona)
Dr
Jordi Pijoan-López
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Dr
Jose Antonio Esquivel
(IAG, Universidad de Granada, Spain)
Dr
Laura Mameli
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Dr
Oriol Vicente Campos
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Prof.
Raquel Piqué Huerta
(Department de Prehistòria, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
