Abstract: Although the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has a long history in archaeology, spatial technologies have been rarely used to analyse the content of textual collections. A newly developed approach termed Geographic Text Analysis (GTA) is now allowing the semi-automated exploration of large corpora incorporating a combination of Natural Language Processing techniques, Corpus Linguistics, and GIS. In this article we explain the development of GTA, propose possible uses of this methodology in the field of archaeology, and give a summary of the challenges that emerge from this type of analysis. 1 Archaeology, space, GIS and texts What (happened), when, where and why, are some of the central questions that a researcher investigates when confronted with the archaeological record. Although the enquiries might seem simple in themselves, the answers to these questions constitute part of a complex puzzle that archaeologists put together in the form of rationalisations from the evidence available, becoming eventually interpretations. In this challenge, we get only fractions of the riddle, which correspond to partial aspects of the 'what', 'when', 'where' or 'why'. Epistemologically, it can be argued that in archaeology, dealing regularly with tangible evidence and the archaeological record, the spatial context -or 'where'-, usually turns out to be the point of departure for any further enquiry. Moreover, the relationships that such evidence sustain often become key to explain the reasons behind the observed phenomenon. In this sense, a particular distribution of settlements in the landscape might be explained through the observation of their spatial association to routes of communication, resources and connections to other dwellings, among many other factors. At a different scale, the location of particular material in an excavation in relation to other spaces might give hints on the actual use of such space. From these examples, is easy to realise that the spatial aspect of the archaeological record has a fundamental role in our discipline. As such, archaeology has considered and discussed space and place as central in almost all of its theoretical and methodological developments. The early adoption of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other spatial technologies in this field, is the result of this strong tradition in spatial thinking, the development at universities of graduated degrees in archaeology specialising in such technologies, testify for the matureness and advances in their use.
Murrietaflores and Gregory REF proposed an approach named Geographical Text Analysis (GTA), which is a combination of techniques from NLP and GIS.
Further Frontiers in GIS: Extending Spatial Analysis to Textual Sources in Archaeology
Open Archaeology
Computer Science