S. Laurenza / V. Martire / C. Putzolu / I. Scerrato
(Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Nowadays, all the archaeological data are digitally recorded and analysed; every excavation or survey fieldwork are made using digital technologies and using Personal Computers and sophisticated software. But what about the huge, heavy and crazy recovering work of ancient data?
What about data coming out from past excavations or surveys ?
How the new digital or IT technologies could help us to recover data and information for a full future digital publication?
How much does it depend on the wish of our teacher to let the data coming out and to be checked deeply with new technologies, without any fear?
How many past excavation or surveys data are still closed in the boxes or bags of old or dead teachers ?
How much will it be important to recover and make accessible those data for the scientific community?
During several years we experimented those questions by ourselves trying to recover, to study, to analyse and to publish different data coming out from excavations and surveys of different periods and from different regions of the world. We experimented during those years several digital ways and solutions, from Database to Hypermedia, from Hypermedia to CAD, from Cad to GIS, with different and sometimes satisfying results. But always the problem comes out at the end, how to publish the work, the results, on a typical paper based publication, on digital media (CD-ROM or DVD), or directly on-line, on the WEB, in order to let the entire community to access to the data. Here we would like to propose our experiences and problems, in order to compare them with other colleagues and to discuss about methodological recording problems and also about the idea to create a portal or a WEB GIS site on the old excavation and survey expeditions known but with missing data.