Christopher S. Peebles, Larry Tenny, Sherri L. Hilgeman (Glenn A. Black Laboratory
of Archaeology, Indiana University)
THREE MILLION AND COUNTING; A MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE ANGEL SITE
AND ITS COLLECTIONS
A management information system (MIS) has been created to control and provide
efficient access to the records and collections gathered by archaeologists from
the Angel Site (12 Vg 1) between 1938 and the present. These data, which comprise
artifact, image, spatial, and documentary objects' are managed by a relational
database system (INGRES, which runs on a DEC MicroVAX II minicomputer) and a Geographic
Information System (GRASS, which runs on a Sun 3/60 workstation).
The first stage of the collections database has been created. Using information
and terms employed by the archaeologists and catalogers who excavated and processed
the material, the field specimen catalog and the artifact catalog have been enregistered
in the database. These records represent 2,622,737 separate objects (and include
1,817,925 sherds) which come from 77,070 field specimen entries. These collections
were gathered from 1,379 excavated "blocks" (10 by 10 foot excavation units) and
represent materials from approximately 3.8% of the site as a whole. In the database,
objects can be associated directly with one another, with individual excavation
units, with particular archaeological features, and in terms of currentparticular
archaeological features, and in terms of current storage locations in the Glenn
A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology. All that remains to complete this database
is registration of several thousand black and white and color photographs.
A separate database has been created to manage more than 200,000 topographic points:
i.e., x, y, and z (elevation) coordinates. When combined with digitized images
of the excavated feature outlines, these data will produce a readily accessible
electronic base map for the Angel site. In turn, the density, distribution, variety,
and abundance of selected classes of artifacts and other materials can be extracted
directly from the database and then visualized in relation to the topography and
their archaeological contexts. So, on the one hand, "a picture is worth a thousand
words," and on the other, "a thousand words deserve a picture."
To this point, the terms and observations used to create the maps and the databases
have been provided by our archaeological ancestor, Glenn A. Black. The current
extension of the artifact database goes beyond these observations. It comprises
the detailed description and analysis of the corpus of "diagnostic" and "painted"
sherds and vessels. These observations will provide the information for a fine
scale ceramic chronology and the foundations for further analysis of the organization
of ceramic production, use, and discard at this major Mississippian settlement.
The Angel site database illustrates the ultimate utility of such an undertaking:
access to the data has been enhanced, and their value as an archaeological asset
has been increased by several orders of magnitude. All future research on the
Angel site will be founded on this database, and the fruits of such research,
in turn, will be included in this database. [return to 1988 abstracts menu][continue to next]