About the Reliability of Archaeological Information

Summary

To study Mesoamerican architecture and urbanism, their graphic description is required. This description must be accurate, and it is traditionally expressed in coded and scaled drawings.

For decades, archaeologists have produced extensive documentation of their excavations, which institutional services in charge of the registration of monuments have supplemented to obtain complete inventories in order to support conservation and restoration activities. However, this material has been generated with recording methods where human intervention was important and indispensable to define quality. These data were then represented by line drawings and scaling of the initial measurements. Many times, the material that comes to us has been drawn, traced, digitized and printed. In other words, to the initial errors, many more were accumulated that diminishes the precision of the representation.

I will compare the quality of the information generated a few years ago with the documentation obtained from an aerial photogrammetry survey. I will develop the problem of human intervention in the registering vs. automated systems and the exhaustive representation vs. traditional planimetry. I will speak about the problem of reliabily of data in order to share information in a wide digital context.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20366