Cite this as: Hall, K. and Loy, M. 2025 Collecting Data in the Conservation Lab for Network Visualisation, Internet Archaeology 69. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.69.8
This article presents the results of a cooperation between conservators and archaeologists in the study of a large assemblage of broken ceramic vessels from a communal tomb, which had multiple episodes of mortuary activity as well as later disturbances. The data collected by the conservators was used with open source software to create a network visualisation of the joins between the pottery sherds found in the tomb. This contributed to the understanding of the formation of the deposits.
Corresponding author: Katharine Hall
[email protected]
Institute for Aegean Prehistory, Study Center East Crete
Michael Loy
[email protected]
University of Durham
Figure 1: Conservator piecing together vessels from the pottery sherds. Image credit: Mike Armato
Figure 2: Ceramic cup after reconstruction (left), and in fragments before reconstruction (right). Image credit: Katharine Hall
Figure 3: The original dataset
Figure 4: Second tab of the original dataset, listing excavation contexts and general location in the tomb
Figure 5: Renaming columns in the original dataset for ease of processing
Figure 6: Creating a Node Table from the datasheet shown in Figure 4, adding a Node ID for each excavation context
Figure 7: Replacing the excavation context with the node ID in the dataset shown in Figure 5
Figure 8: Creating the Edges Table
Figure 9: Labelling nodes in Cytoscape
Figure 10: Network visualisation from Cytoscape of the joins between pottery sherds in the tomb
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