I was very interested to see this. A set of 'nationally' agreed set of
definitions (does this mean England or Britain?) would be absurd. For
example, periods defined as 'Anglo-Saxon' or 'Roman' would be irrelevant to
us, just as 'Pictish' wouldn't be a lot of use to the folks in Hampshire.
We tend here to take the Scandinavian approach and bring the 'Iron Age'
through to around 500AD. It shows the problem of culturally defined period
labels. A GIS type approach might be useful or it might just generate
endless debate about the geographical areas to which different cultural
labels could be given. However, people do want to retrieve things from our
SMR as 'Pictish'. Maybe alongside the cultural labels we need to have sites
recorded to periods defined in actual years. But then we run into the
problem that the Iron Age seems to have started here later than it did in
the south...
Interesting problem anyway.
John Wood
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John Wood
Senior Archaeologist
Planning and Development Service
The Highland Council
Glenurquhart Road
Inverness IV3 5NX
Tel: 01463 702502
Fax: 01463 702298
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.higharch.demon.co.uk
-----Original Message-----
From: JD Richards [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 20 September 1999 15:17
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Exegesis SMR - searching by period
On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Fernie, Kate wrote:
> I know that there are various projects on the go looking at networking
> archaeological databases across the UK and Europe. It would be
interesting
> to know how any such network might tackle the problem of boundaries which
> differ in time and space.
>
At ADS we've always envisaged that such an interface would need to be
GIS-based, with the period term list specific to the GIS polygon. This is
achievable in Dublin Core schemes under DC.coverage, but not yet
implemented by us, or anyone else, as far as I'm aware...
Julian Richards
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Dr Julian D. Richards Tel: +44 1904 433930
Director, Archaeology Data Service Fax: +44 1904 433902
Department of Archaeology Email: [log in to unmask]
University of York
The King's Manor
York, YO1 7EP, UK
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