Digital Mapping of Medieval Cemeteries

Abstract

It has become almost standard practice that archaeological research on cemeteries is published in a similar fashion, specifically when primary sources supplement the data presented. Aside from the interpretative part, a catalog of all graves, buried individuals, and finds is published along with a map of the site and graphical depictions of the various entities. This is mostly structured within a four-level hierarchy beginning with the cemetery, the contained graves, the burials from each grave, and the finds associated with the burial. Today, even though many publications and their catalogs are based on or derived from digital data and published as open access, the outcome is often printed text such as a pdf file. Digital data that is properly structured and can be used out of the box for further analyses is rarely available. The presented article discusses how to digitize data on burials and how to provide them to the public in sustainable and comprehensible ways. Within previous and ongoing projects, the author and his team have developed a database system (OpenAtlas) that is used for the data acquisition of archaeological and anthropological research data that also maps information directly to the CIDOC CRM. Temporal and spatial fuzziness are dealt with following various concepts such as GeoJSON-T. For providing the data as Linked Open Data, the “linked places” format is used and an API provides a JSON-LD representation of each entity. Due to the “standard” approach implemented when publishing cemeteries, the data acquisition is mostly achieved by manually recording the published information in the database. In the following projects, data from several hundred Early Medieval Austrian and Czech burial sites with several thousand graves and finds have been digitized. To publicize the information, an online web application (https://thanados.net) has been developed to present and disseminate this data.