(communication presentée lors de l’assemblée annuelle de l’Association de recherche et d’étude des sites archéologiques comtois, février 2017) L’étude du passé, historique ou archéologique, présuppose le plus souvent un découpage du temps préalable, par siècles ou périodes (pré)historiques, c’est-à-dire une grille prédéfinie dans laquelle sont répartis les objets, les événements et les récits. Les spécialités […]
Pebbles, faces and landscapes: the archaeology of simulacra
Chichibu museum (photo: www.thisiscolossal.com) Several weeks ago I stumbled upon an amusing article on a museum displaying pebbles and rocks resembling human faces, situated in Chichibu, Japan. The stones are called jinmenseki (珍石) and one should be able to recognise human faces in their naturally occurring dents and holes. The founder of the museum, Shozo […]
To see or to be seen concepts, analysis and modelling of viewsheds in archaeology
Vendredi 18 novembre 2016 De 10h à 13h et de 14h à 17h -107M salle de conférence de l’UMR Chrono-environnement, UFR ST, la Bouloie, 16 route de Gray, 25030 Besançon Séminaire Thématique organisé par Laure NUNINGER, CR CNRS et Zoran CUCKOVIC, Doctorant à l’Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté au laboratoire de Chrono-Environnement, en collaboration avec la […]
QGIS visibility analysis algorithm
It took me long time to develop an algorithm for the visibility analysis which would be comparable in terms of speed and quality to those available in other packages. And then some more time to tweak it for the type of analysis the QGIS visibility plugin is intended: higher volume calculation of multiple viewsheds over […]
Advanced viewshed analysis: a Quantum GIS plug-in for the analysis of visual landscapes.
Published in: The Journal of Open Source Software 4(1). doi: 10.21105/joss.00032 Author : Zoran Čučković Summary: Viewshed analysis is a standard feature of GIS software packages, such as ArcGIS (ESRI 2016), GRASS (Neteler et al. 2012) or ERDAS (2015). However, these implementations vary considerably in terms of their versatility and robustness. Software in the free […]
Fortifying seascapes: Bronze Age fortified sites of the north-eastern Adriatic Sea
(Presented at “Socio-Environmental Dynamics over the Last 12,000 Years: The Creation of Landscapes IV” conference held at Kiel University, March 24 – 27, 2015) The north-eastern Adriatic archipelago (Kvarner, Croatia) was famously labelled as the “Amber Islands” by ancient Greek sources, testifying to its crucial position on the so-called Amber Route during the later prehistory. […]
Topophilia and the emergence of prehistoric sanctuaries (NW Balkans, 10th – 5th c. BC)
(Presented at “Rencontres doctorales archéologiques de l’EEPB Bibracte”, Centre archéologique européen du Mont Beuvray, 28 – 30 avril 2015) In a definition given by geographer Yi Fu Tuan “ Topophilia is the affective bond between people and place or setting “. Even though this concept pertains to an intimate “sense of place” which may seem […]
Topographic networks: a new approach to topographic position analysis and modelling of topographic ontologies
(abstract of a conference paper presented at TheoQant conference held in Besançon, 20 – 22 may 2015 [abstract book here]) The Earth’s surface or terrain is most commonly represented in Geographic Information Systems as a gridded matrix, the raster. Somewhat less often, so called triangulated irregular networks (TIN) are used as well. These two data […]
Natural places and archaeology
First time I heard of something like “natural places” was some ten years ago at a conference in Slovenia. Several, mostly young researchers were proud to demonstrate an existence of non-man-made features on their sites, features that apparently gained a symbolic value before or during human habitation. For instance, trees that were incorporated in Neolithic […]
Exploring intervisibility networks : a case study from Bronze and Iron Age Istria (Croatia and Slovenia).
Published in: F. Giligny, F. Djindjian, L. Costa, P. Moscati and S. Robert (eds.) CAA 2014 – 21st century Archeaology: concepts, methods and tools. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Paris, April 2014, 2015 Author : Zoran Čučković Abstract: Using the rich archaeological record of 480 hillfort […]