Developing a Geovisual Analytics Environment for Investigating Archaeological Events: Extending the Space–Time Cube

Abstract

Over the past several decades, archaeologists have been developing and improving methods for collection, analysis, visualization, and modeling of site information. Despite the increasing capabilities of GIScience tools in recent years, archaeology is an application domain where these capabilities have not been fully utilized. This paper presents preliminary results on the development of geovisual analytics functions for archaeological investigation by extending Space–Time Cube (STC) software currently under development. Graph-theoretical techniques are implemented to uncover and visualize spatio-temporal relationships between artefacts from different historical periods excavated at different locations. These techniques are implemented and tested on a database of archaeological sites in Puerto Rico. The contribution of this research to visual analytics is the integration of space, time, and relationships within a single interactive environment. The extended STC facilitates insight into potential interactions or clashes among different cultures identified through archaeological digs. This is achieved through building linkages between database tuples based on attribute similarities which can be explicitly visualized and queried within the STC environment. The paper concludes with a summary of the effectiveness and potential of the prototype and its functionality.