Last House on the Hill

Abstract

The aim of our project, Last House on the Hill (LHotH), is to holistically reconstitute the rich multimedia and primary research data with the impressive texts of the monograph, the printed final report of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Ç atalhöyük (BACH) project, in which a team from UC Berkeley excavated a group of Neolithic 9000-year old buildings at this famous cultural heritage location in Central Anatolia, Turkey. The Last House on the Hill brings together the published text, complete project database (including all media formats such as photographs, videos, maps, line drawings), related Web sites, data and media outside the direct domain of the BACH project, and recontextualized presentations of the data as remixes, movies, and other interpretive works by BACH team members and many others. We are achieving this through an event-centered, CIDOC-CRM-compatible implementation ontology, expressed through an open-source Web publishing platform, providing open access, transparency and open-endedness to what is normally the closed and final process of monograph publication.The idea of embedding, interweaving, entangling, and otherwise linking the data and media from archaeological excavations with their interpretation and meaningful presentation in an open access sharable platform has long been an ambition of those of us working in the digital documentation of archaeological research and the public presentation of cultural heritage. Formidable barriers still exist to making it possible for projects to achieve these aims, ranging from intellectual property concerns to providing commitments to the long-term sustainability of the digital content. We believe that our event-centered implementation ontology will make it far easier for archaeologists and researchers in other disciplines to organize, manage, and share their data while gaining the significant benefits of the CIDOC-CRM framework.This article describes the strategy, goals, architecture, and implementation for the project, emphasizing the novel and innovative approaches that were required to make the project successful.

A study of semantic integration across archaeological data and reports in different languages

“…In contrast to previous work in the STAR project, where a more detailed archaeological extension of the CIDOC CRM ontology was employed (for a discussion of granularity, see [5] ), for the purposes of the case study the semantic framework comprised high level entities of the CRM, further described by types from the Getty AAT Thesaurus. This is somewhat similar to the use of a few broad concepts described by Ashley et al [15] ) for their work with Çatalhöyük excavation data (their approach involved creating superclasses). The AAT narrower concept expansion functionality in the SPARQL 1.1 demonstrator application (section 3.1) enabled the capability to query at a high level of generality and still retrieve specific results, or to directly query at a lower level of detail.…”

“…This has led to the adoption of event-based data modelling approaches within archaeology, where the assignment of an interpretation can be recorded as an event, allowing potential for further events with other interpretations. For example, Ashley et al [15] discuss how they employed the event-based CIDOC CRM ontology as a framework in a 'digital mirror' of a more conventional print report on work by Berkeley Archaeologists at the long running Çatalhöyük excavation, influenced by ontological modelling done by English Heritage's Centre for Archaeology [16] . The Berkeley team emphasise the complexity of the mapping process and the need for timeconsuming data cleansing with typical archaeological datasets.…”

“…were commonly applicable to all. This was a detailed and time consuming exercise but without it the semantic alignment of data elements between the datasets would have been less successful; the issue was encountered in ARIADNE generally and is also emphasised by Ashley et al [15] . The OpenRefine application [37] was used to correct these issues.…”

3D visualization and reflexive archaeology: A virtual reconstruction of Çatalhöyük history houses

“…Subsequently, the work of the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük (BACH) team on digital media and interactive data visualization contributed to further advance our understanding of the hermeneutical role of visualization in archaeology (Stevanovic and Tringham, 2012). Specifically, from 1997 to 2003 the BACH team led by Ruth Tringham produced seminal non-linear ways to disseminate the archaeological record and its interpretations, including open access metadata publications, remediation of different media content and platforms, interactive visualizations of archaeological data on the Web (Ashley et al, 2011), and collaborative virtual reconstructions in Second Life (Morgan, 2009).…”

Immersive Visualization and Curation of Archaeological Heritage Data: Çatalhöyük and the Dig@IT App

“…The 3D spatial approach for the representation and interpretation of the archaeological record discussed in this article relies on seminal work on visual reflexivity and visual interpretation in archaeology (Hodder 1997a;Emele 2000;Cox 2011;Perry, Chapman, and Wylie 2014), on previous literature on the documentation, analysis, re-contextualization and multivocal discussion of Çatalhöyük's data using digital technologies (Ashley, Tringham, and Perlingieri 2011) and online virtual environments (Morgan 2009), as well as on previous work on 3D data capture and immersive visualization of Çatalhöyük buildings in virtual environments and mobile apps (Lercari, Matthiesen, et al 2014;Lercari 2016a.…”