Attempts at spatial analyses of data from the Polish Archaeological Record

Abstract

Since the mid-1970s, the Polish Archaeological Record has been a national program in Poland with the primary objective of cataloguing archaeological sites, providing detailed descriptions and exact geographical locations. It is in operation to this day. So far, approximately 90% of the area of Poland has been prospected and almost 470,000 archaeological sites catalogued. Currently, work is underway to digitise the entire database. This paper presents our attempts to use the digitised data from this database to study the intensity of settlement processes in the past as well as how to visualise these data on a map. For the purpose of this research, archaeological data from an area in the northeast of Poland were digitised in a GIS environment. Examples of similar spatial analyses were taken from Scottish and Czech research and adapted to this case. The results, a series of maps showing the intensity of traces of human habitation in different time periods, demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of such visualisations.