Dear All,
I support Frances. The same questions have been raised on the recent FISH e-conference on GIS. Not only will locally produced polygons be different from EH's, but when you all get OS MasterMap, local polygons may well snap to an entirely different OS polygon. North Yorkshire has well over a thousand SAMs, some boundaries of which are still identified as blobby circles on fuzzy 25" maps, rather than on nice and neat 1:10,000's, and some of them are point objects such as cup & ring marked stones or crosses. I raised two pertinent issues in the e-conference. The simple one was what resources nationally are being committed to resolving the problem. The second issue was one of hierarchy. If only the description of the boundary / monument is legally definitive, then any polygon, local, national, or even accurate, needs to be accompanied by hierarchically nested information which gives the context of the monument and the definitive legal description. My view is that the first layer of GIS representation of SAMs need not necessarily be accurate polygons but could be just index markers (for want of a better word) leading to more detailed "emergent" information. It is after all "monuments" that are scheduled, not geographical areas, hence EH's reluctance to schedule urban archaeological areas.
Cheers,
Neil
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