Digital Thebes project

Thebes is one of the most important historic and prehistoric sites on mainland Greece. Its occupation history starts from the Neolithic and goes all the way down to modern times. The stratigraphic sequences and finds demonstrate that the citadel comprises successive occupation levels, including a modern city at the very top. With regard to the Late Bronze Age, Thebes seems to have been a powerful palatial centre, the hub of interregional and overseas exchange and intensive production of specific elite goods intended for barter, gift-exchange and local consumption. Unfortunately, the excavation of Mycenaean Thebes has from the very start been piecemeal, constricted in individual expropriated plots, a fact imposed by the contemporary grid of the city of Thebes.

GIS seems to be the best way of dealing with an ever increasing (owing to continuous building activity) fragmentation of the record. At a first stage this can happen simply within the framework of cultural resource or heritage management, allowing locational analysis and mapping of archaeological elements. The ability of GIS in maintaining large databases and perform cartographically based queries is very useful in this respect. Yet, we all know that GIS is not just CAD or DBMS, or a tool to visualise quantified data. As Cowen (1988) puts it, GIS is "a decision support system involving the integration of spatially referenced data (and non-spatially referenced data I should add) in a problem-solving environment". Further, recent GIS research (and by this do not mean applications but conceptual development) has been successfull in opening up non-commercial GIS to the temporal dimension. The uniqueness of GIS consists in that it creates new entities from existing spatial and non-spatial data. It transforms implicit relations into explicit relations (Stine & Lanter 1990) or, to recite a popular mantra, "it converts data into information".

The data consist of 1. geometric data, such as vector elements and point data, 2. attributes, i.e. non-spatial descriptive information about geometric data, and 3. metadata, such as coordinates, projection etc. Currently, we are not using any raster data, but we are looking into acquiring satellite images of the wider area. The data come from different sources and at the time of acquisition they were both in conventional and digital form. The official town maps were digitised, merged with new ARC/INFO files containing more detailed information on modern built features. Topographical points from the conventional maps are being interpolated to provide a modern surface of Thebes. Additional contours and points from the Greek Army maps have been imported, while the official Geological map of the area will soon be digitised for the same purpose. The plans of individual excavated sites have been calibrated, digitised and imported from the Archaeological Service reports and miscellaneous publications, while stratigraphic information derived from the publications has been converted to approximate depths of bedrock, strata, buildings and finds from modern level. The latter figures will be interpolated to give a rough picture of the bedrock relief for general calibrating purposes and mainly, for superimposing roughly estimated horizons of prehistoric strata. At the same time, a fully functional relational database on Access 97 platform has been compiled to classify all excavation information available in the reports and publications. Our basic entities are: artefacts to features, artefacts and features to excavation area and finally excavation area to sites -the record does not allow us to spatially reference each artefact separately. Finally, illustrations from the publications, referring to artefacts, sites etc. have been scanned. These will be retrieved as active map objects and will serve gerenal heritage management and museological purposes once the project is completed and offered to the Archaeological Service.