Managing the spatial dimension of the European Archaelogical Resource. Trends and perspectives

García-Sanjuán, Leonardo and Wheatley, D. W. (2002) Managing the spatial dimension of the European Archaelogical Resource. Trends and perspectives. In, García-Sanjuán, Leonardo and Wheatley, D. W. (eds.) Mapping the future of the past : managing the spatial dimension of the European archaeological resource. (Series Historia y Geografía, 78) Sevilla, Spain. Universidad de Sevilla, pp. 151-166.

Abstract

In the late 1960s Swedish archaeologist C.A. Moberg claimed that research and management of the European archaeological resource were entering a new stage characterised super-abundance of information, which in turn produced the challenge of an ‘archaeographic crisis’. The accumulation of data and archival material from rescue excavations and the explosion in the volume of scientific data in archaeological research were the two main factors leading to such an unprecedented increase in information (Moberg, 1987:13). Almost thirty five years on, it is hard not to be impressed by the predictive sharpness of Moberg´s statement. Both curatorial and research-oriented interventions (excavations or otherwise) have continued to be carried out at an increased rate, as the evidence discussed throughout this book shows.
Archaeological Resource Management (ARM) and scientific organisations responsible for such interventions have become firmly established in many more European countries and regions (as they have world-wide). At the same time, archaeological data analysis practice now comprises techniques that derive from a vast range of scientific disciplines ranging from physics to chemistry, geology, soil science, medicine, biology, etc. This trend towards a significantly expanded concept of what constitutes archaeological data, only incipient at the time Moberg made his forecast, has now become mainstream. A survey carried out in the early 1990s, before the rapid growth of Internet access, suggested that an average of 3000 books on archaeological subjects were being published in the world per year, just in English (Runnels, 1994:358).

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Contributors

Author: D. W. Wheatley

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