Mark Gillings

Spatial Technology and Archaeology : The Archaeological Applications of GIS

Archaeology, Space and GIS. The Spatial database. Acquiring and Integrating Data. Manipulating Spatial Data. Digital Elevation Models. Beginning to Quantify Spatial Patterns. Sites, Territories and Distance. Location Models and Prediction. Trend Surface and Interpolation. Visibility Analysis and Archaeology. Cultural Resource Management. Future Directions. References. Index.

Seeing is perceiving

Abstract Current archaeological concerns with viewing and all things visual are predicated upon a series of assumptions that have so far escaped serious consideration. This state of affairs resulted from the way in which our concerns with mapping and analysing patterns of seeing and looking in the past emerged before any broader critical consideration of the senses per se. To place an interpretative premium upon viewing space is to accept that vision as a perceptual category was meaningful to those under study, and that it, above all else, shaped and structured understanding to the point that it can profitably be represented and analysed in complete isolation from all other sensory stimuli. In this paper we argue that vision should be folded back into the mix of the sensorium and sketch two potential pathways for achieving this.

Non‐portable stone artefacts and contexts of meaning: The tale of Grey Wether (www.museums.ncl.ac.uk/Avebury/stone4.htm)

It is easy to appreciate that portable artefacts can carry lengthy biographies. Those biographies can encapsulate many meanings which will have varied from production, to use, to deposition, with significance changing according to time, place and ownership. However, the cultural biography of static objects, particularly if they are essentially natural rather than culturally modified, may seem more prescribed. It is our contention that this is often far from the case, as the social lives of the stones making up the megalithic settings at Avebury, Wiltshire, vividly demonstrate.

Romancing the stones. Towards a virtual and elemental Avebury

The late Neolithic monument complex at Avebury, Wiltshire, continues to elicit much curiosity and attention. However, with excavation unlikely to occur in the near future, new and non-destructive means of exploring the monument complex are required. Although a number of such investigations have been undertaken, to date no concerted effort has been made to consolidate the results within a single framework. The opening stages of such a project, involving innovative research using GIS and Virtual-Reality technologies within an explicitly theoretical interpretative agenda, are described here.

The miniliths of Exmoor

This paper presents the results of a programme of research on an unusual group of prehistoric stone settings located on Exmoor, south-west England. Taking a variety of semi-geometric and apparently random forms, a total of 59 settings have been identified, with new discoveries taking place on a regular basis. These stone settings are remarkable for their diminutive size, with component stones often standing to heights of 100 mm or less, a factor which has led to their being termed ‘minilithic’. Through reference to the results of a programme of geophysical survey and small-scale excavation targeted upon a particularly rich cluster of settings around the upper reaches of Badgworthy Water, issues of morphology, dating, relationships, and the implications of the Exmoor miniliths for developing understandings monumentality are discussed.

Embracing uncertainty and challenging dualism in the GIS-based study of a palaeo-flood plain

Abstract The following paper aims to take a critical look at the role that can be played within the broad context of landscape based archaeological research by Geographical Information Systems (GIS). It will be argued that the rapid acceptance of GIS by archaeologists has not been without its problems, with a number of archaeologists wondering whether, despite the hype, any new approaches have been introduced at all. This, it will be argued, is a direct result of GIS-based applications tending to work within a largely inherited theoretical framework and, more importantly, lacking at present a critical theory of practice.The aim of the paper is move beyond critique to suggest how GIS can provide not only an efficient means of generating simple distribution maps, but a flexible environment within which to bridge developments in theory and practice. Using an on-going case-study centred upon flood events in the palaeo-flood plain of the river Tisza, the implications of using GIS to welcome uncertainty into th...

Making Megaliths: Shifting and Unstable Stones in the Neolithic of the Avebury Landscape

This paper focuses upon the web of practices and transformations bound up in the extraction and movement of megaliths during the Neolithic of southern Britain. The focus is on the Avebury landscape of Wiltshire, where over 700 individual megaliths were employed in the construction of ceremonial and funerary monuments. Locally-sourced, little consideration has been given to the process of acquisition and movement of sarsen stones that make up key monuments such as the Avebury henge and its avenues; attention instead focussing on the middle-distance transportation of sarsen out of this region to Stonehenge. Though stone movements were local, we argue they were far from lacking in significance, as indicated by the subsequent monumentalization of at least two locations from which they were likely acquired. We argue that since such stones embodied place(s);their removal, movement and resetting represented a remarkably dynamic and potentially disruptive reconfiguration of the world as it was known. Megaliths were never inert or stable matter, and we need to embrace this in our interpretative accounts if we are to understand the very different types of monument that emerged in prehistory as a result