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Paradigm or Practice? Situating GIS in Contemporary Archaeological Method and Theory

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Abstract

Geographic information systems (GIS) has been used in archaeology for four decades, and colloquially appears to have become a main tool in the geospatial aspects of archaeological practice. In this paper, we examine temporal trends in the use and/or mention of GIS in archaeological publications (books and journal articles), conference presentations, and websites. We gathered data through keyword searches and with formal sampling surveys and conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses to characterize the changing nature and intensity of GIS use in archaeology over time, and then contextualize these trends with a narrative history of archaeological GIS. We show how archaeological GIS-use has grown from a few early adopters of the 1980s, through a slow initial integration phase in the 1990s, to a set of two major expansions in the 2000s and 2010s. While we find that applied use of GIS has grown to the point where it can be considered ubiquitous—if not completely universal—in the discipline, we also discovered that the major focus in archaeological GIS advancement is methodological rather than theoretical. We identify five roadblocks that we believe have hampered the development of a theory-rich archaeological GIS: (1) deficiencies in the archaeological GIS education model, (2) over-reliance on commercial software, (3) technical/technological barriers, (4) gaps in acceptance of GIS, and (5) the perception of GIS as “just a tool.” We offer initial suggestions for ways forward to mitigate the effects of these roadblocks and build a more robust, theoretically sophisticated relationship with GIS in archaeology.

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Data Availability

All data and analysis scripts employed in this research are made publicly available via an Open Science Framework repository (Ullah, 2023) at the following persistent identifier: DOI https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3W7N8, and URL: https://osf.io/3w7n8/. All materials are released under the CC-By Attribution 4.0 International license, which allows reuse and dissemination of the material with the only restriction that the original source be cited/attributed in all derivations or redistributions of the material.

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Acknowledgements

The idea and impetus for this paper originated during a seminar discussion in the Spring of 2022 in Ullah’s archaeological GIS method and theory class, titled “Computational Archaeology,” in which Clow and Meling were students. We thank the other students (present and past) in this class for fruitful initial discussion of many of the issues that we raised in this paper. We also thank and acknowledge the San Diego State University College of Arts and Letters, who awarded this project a microgrant in Spring 2022 to facilitate some of the data collection for this project.

Funding

Partial financial support for this work was received from the San Diego State University College of Arts and Letters migrogrants program. Author Ullah has contributed source code to the GRASS GIS project, but received no financial compensation for this role, and this did not influence the contents of this paper.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA

    Isaac I. Ullah, Zachery Clow & Juliette Meling

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception, design, and methodology. ZC, JM, and IU performed data collection. Data analysis and figure preparation was performed by IU, and IU, ZC, and JM interpreted the results. The first draft of the manuscript was written by IU, and all authors commented and contributed portions of text on all subsequent versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Isaac I. Ullah.

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Ullah, I.I., Clow, Z. & Meling, J. Paradigm or Practice? Situating GIS in Contemporary Archaeological Method and Theory. J Archaeol Method Theory (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-023-09638-1

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