Archeofoss 2020 hosted Augusto Palombini’s works on the reconstruction of ancient landscape, comprising the whole vegetation cover and the geomorphology, both natural and anthropic (abstract in https://zenodo.org/record/4002961#.YHgzlOgzaUk).
In Archeofoss 2020, Joseph Lewis showed the potential of open source “R package leastcostpath analysis” to answer archaeological questions in GIS systems (abstract in https://zenodo.org/record/4002961#.YHgzlOgzaUk).
In Archeofoss 2020, Emanuel Demetrescu and Bruno Fanini gave a talk on the Extended Matrix methodology, an open source software 3d tools to transform archaeological record into a virtual reconstruction (abstract in https://zenodo.org/record/4002961#.YHgzlOgzaUk).
In recent years, the interest of scientific community in virtual reconstructive hypotheses has grown. Demetrescu and Fanini presented the EMtools and EMviq, which can help us to go back in time and “visit” the places we came from, going back to the past like in a real time machine.
A central aspect in the development of scientifically correct virtual reconstructive hypotheses is the possibility to manage complex cross-references of data and publish, not only the visual result of the reconstruction, but also all the data used to obtain it and, in particular, the sources, reasoning and interpretations.
The proposed innovative tools are based on the Extended Matrix (EMtools - https://github.com/zalmoxes-laran/EM-blender-tools). These tools allow transforming the stratigraphic archaeological record into formalized reconstructive hypotheses that tell us how a context must have appeared at a given time in the past. Then, using the 3D Extended Matrix Visual Inspector and Querier (EMviq - https://github.com/phoenixbf/emviq) this information can be seen in a scientifically correct virtual reconstructive scenario.
Archeofoss 2020 hosted “little minions”, by Timo Homburg and Florian Thiery. These are helper tools that reduce workload or optimize workflows in archaeology’s daily work. (abstract in https://zenodo.org/record/4002961#.YHgzlOgzaUk).
In Archeofoss 2020, Irene Carpanese presented A.R.C.A. (Archiviazione, Ricerca e Comunicazione del dato in Archeologia), an open-source software capable of publishing archaeological data on-line (abstract in https://zenodo.org/record/4002961#.YHgzlOgzaUk).
The goal of the software is to manage, in a simple way, archaeological data of different nature (textual to spatial or even 3D data), making them “scalable”: easily reusable independently of other projects and different institutions. The idea is to create a product that encourages the data holder/owner to make their information open and available.
The software was developed without a typical relational DB, in order to build a flexible and adaptive product able to communicate with different datasets and capable of interconnecting various data collected in multiple projects.
This project laid the cornerstone to develop A.R.C.A. itself. The software has big potential, but its growth depends on its use by the archaeological community, which can increase the quality and remove limits.