In the past, I have occasionally written about GIS and Archaeology, specifically how to learn GIS for Archaeology. It’s a real shame but there are not many high quality resources for those interested in learning GIS for Archaeology on their own. I have gathered together some resources here. Let me know if there are some I am missing.
Learning
University of Leicester GIS Training for Archaeologists – decent FREE online course that takes you through the basics. It uses ArcGIS which is a pretty expensive program to buy and it is also base on version 9.1 (newest version is 10.0). Though even watching the videos will give you an idea of the basics of GIS.
To get the basics of GIS and to understand how it works see this presentation. It is a great series of presentations by R Haddlesey though a bit dated (2007) but still incredibly good.
For more on GIS you can see the chapter by W. Fredrick Limp on GIS and Archaeology in the book Archaeological Computing. This is a FREE book to download. The rest of the book is a great read too.
Oxford Archaeology has developed a manual for Open Source GIS and archaeological survey.
GIS software can be very tricky to handle but if you read through the above sources you should be able to get a handle on it.
Free to Use Software
Before you try to use this software read the resources above. If not you will just be frustrated.
GIS software package from an Oxford Archaeology associate – a suit of open source GIS tools and Portable software package
They do not hang you out to dry with this software package and there are supports for each piece of software-
gvSIG:
international mailing list
PostgreSQL:
international mailing lists
PostGIS:
support pages
UMN MapServer:
mailing lists
GRASS GIS:
support pages
Quantum GIS:
forums
GRASS GIS and Quantum GIS are two programs that you can also download on your own. They also have supporting documantation to help you learn how to use the software- again read the resources above or you might have problems.
Llamahead
March 6, 2012
Really Appreciated out of work at the moment so I’ll be going through these properly over the next couple of works
Richard Haddlesey
March 8, 2012
I’m glad you found my his resources of use, if a little dated. I taught Arcaheological Computing to some level 2 undergrads and these are the slides inadequate for the theory sessions. I agree though, it is hard to find good, accessible information on the web. Very well.done with your blog by the way..would you like a link back from my site?
Richard
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
March 12, 2012
Thanks for putting the slides online. It is amazing how few people do. If it is not to much trouble a link would help other people find this list through search engines.
Richard Haddlesey
March 8, 2012
I’m glad you found my his resources of use, if a little dated. I taught Arcaheological Computing to some level 2 undergrads and these are the slides inadequate for the theory sessions. I agree though, it is hard to find good, accessible information on the web. Very well.done with your blog by the way..would you like a link back from my site?
Richard
archaeofieldtech
March 29, 2012
Thanks for posting this Doug. I can’t wait to look these over in my free time. I mostly use the ESRI software, but I don’t have all of the extensions, so it makes some analysis difficult. I recently had success doing slope calculations with MapWindow, a very nice, easy to use open source GIS program. The built-in Help explained how to do the analysis pretty well!
johnwallx
June 9, 2012
Right in line with everyone else that’s been saying thank you!