Notes on Contributors

Note

Notes on Contributors     

Geographic Visualization in Archaeology

Archaeologists are often considered frontrunners in employing spatial approaches within the social sciences and humanities, including geospatial technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) that are now routinely used in archaeology. Since the late 1980s, GIS has mainly been used to support data collection and management as well as spatial analysis and modeling. While fruitful, these efforts have arguably neglected the potential contribution of advanced visualization methods to the generation of broader archaeological knowledge. This paper reviews the use of GIS in archaeology from a geographic visualization (geovisual) perspective and examines how these methods can broaden the scope of archaeological research in an era of more user-friendly cyber-infrastructures. Like most computational databases, GIS do not easily support temporal data. This limitation is particularly problematic in archaeology because processes and events are best understood in space and time. To deal with such shortcomings in existing tools, archaeologists often end up having to reduce the diversity and complexity of archaeological phenomena. Recent developments in geographic visualization begin to address some of these issues and are pertinent in the globalized world as archaeologists amass vast new bodies of georeferenced information and work towards integrating them with traditional archaeological data. Greater effort in developing geovisualization and geovisual analytics appropriate for archaeological data can create opportunities to visualize, navigate, and assess different sources of information within the larger archaeological community, thus enhancing possibilities for collaborative research and new forms of critical inquiry.     

Rice temper: technological solutions and source identification in the Indian Ocean

This paper defines a group of pottery tempered with rice husk and stem occurring in a restricted range of forms that is found throughout the Indian Ocean between approximately the first centuries BC/AD and the third century AD. Samples from the Red Sea and India are examined petrographically to compare their clay matrix, which isolates a range of variability within a restricted suite indicative of a shared source region. The rice husk temper is further examined biologically and by SEM to identify more closely what parts of it were used, how it may have been processed prior to being added and the technological choice of rice husk and stem as a temper. Given the variability in fabric it is suggested that the making of this pottery was undertaken on a small scale and through comparative studies we isolate the region of Gujarat, India as its source region, enabling the pottery to be used as a trade indicator.