Cite this as: Winters, J. 2007 Editorial, Internet Archaeology 21. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.21.8
The majority of articles in this issue are concerned with developing new methodologies. In A Faceted Query Engine Applied to Archaeology, Ross et al. make an important contribution to archaeological informatics by hinting at what the next generation of search tools might look like. Boldrini, in Planning Uncertainty: Creating an Artefact Density Index for North Yorkshire, England argues that given the way chance finds are often recorded within most Historic Environment Records, they may give distorted views of the archaeological potential of an area during development control decision making. He looks at an alternative method for mapping such finds in order to produce an Artefact Density Index for areas, which more usefully reflects the pattern of activities across the landscape.
Marlous Craane, in Analysing Medieval Urban Space, looks the spaces that hold buildings together. Although it perhaps can only be applied to towns where there is good quality evidence for the precise layout at a point in time, it is nonetheless a very interesting and important addition to Buildings Archaeology research. Martin Pitts in Consumption, deposition and social practice: a ceramic approach to intra-site analysis in late Iron Age to Roman Britain outlines an approach for the interrogation of excavated pottery assemblages from archaeological sites. The methodology in this article is potentially of international interest to many periods and its strength lies in the methodology and the development of Correspondence Analysis (CA) from Principle Component Analysis (PCA). A very useful case-study in the development of quantified analytical techniques of large ceramic datasets.
Finally, the 3rd LEAP exemplar, Silchester Roman Town Insula IX: The Development of an Urban Property c. AD 40-50 - c. AD 250 by Clarke et al. closes issue 21. The article traces the development of an urban property in the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester, Hampshire, England) from the late 1st to the mid-3rd century AD. Three successive phases of construction and their related artefactual and biological remains are described and interpreted. Each examplar from the LEAP project investigates ways in which electronic publication can provide broad access to research findings but tries to achieve this in slightly different ways each time. In this exemplar, we've taken the most simple (most effective?) approach. There's no GIS or even databases in the article, instead the narrative detailing the authors' interpretation is brimming with images (site photos, finds, reconstructions) and contains embedded links that take the reader to all levels of the associated excavation and finds records held by the Archaeology Data Service. If this is the kind of electronic publication you want to see more of, let us know!
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