Traditional archaeology is pricey and slow, yet crucial for heritage and culture. Involving locals is key but takes expertise and time.
Placemaker & Humap offer fresh solutions for collecting and showcasing archaeological data.
Interested in using Humap for a grant-funded project? Our Bid Kit has all of the information you’ll need for a great application.
You can also check out Inherited Places, a Humap guest blog on prehistoric archaeology by Dr Samantha Brummage, PhD.
Community involvement and online presence are crucial for modern archaeology.
The Portalis project is a collaboration between the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, the South East Technology University of Ireland, Waterford City and County Council, and Ceredigion County Council.
This multidisciplinary team is investigating the earliest voyages between Wales and Ireland, and community engagement and the production of educational resources are central to the project. The Portalis team is using Humap to turn their data into an interactive, multimedia repository of their findings that’s accessible to everyone.
You can also see this in action on Layers of London, which contains at time of writing 791 records and 25 collections tagged with “archaeology.”
What if land could be surveyed from home, by anyone?
The Placemaker platform unites modern maps, satellite maps, historic maps, Historic Environment Records and LiDar in one place, and gives users all the tools they need to mark areas of interest.
The data is then stored in PostGIS, to be returned to and amended as many times as needed.
Crowdsourced, crowdfunded archaeology is here to stay. With more people than ever interested in archaeology, a platform anyone can use is crucial.
Placemaker is completely web-based, no-code, and has been extensively user-tested. Harness the power of local knowledge and public interest in archaeology and use it to optimise your operations!
In 2021, they teamed up with Humap to try out our new tool – Placemaker.
Prefer video? Humap co-founder and co-director Ed Jones gave a talk on Placemaker and Digventures at GeoMob. You can find it here (it begins at 5:52).
H.E.R’s (Historic Environment Records) exist for every area of the U.K., but are often unreliable or incomplete. Digventures and ArchAI, funded by a Nesta Collective Intelligence Grant, set out to find out how crowd intelligence and artificial intelligence could work together to identify sites of archaeological interest and improve the reliability of existing H.E.R’s.
Using Placemaker to manually explore layers of map data (LiDAR, satellite, historical etc) and mark places of interest with drawing tools and metadata, the Digventures volunteers created a data set to teach the AI how to identify archaeological sites.
Everything the volunteers made was saved to a central database that could be returned to, saved in geometries in PostGIS for ease of exporting and analysis,
You can find out more about the AI side of the project here.
Why does this matter? In the words of Digventures themselves, this partnership has the potential “to inform spatial planning, de-risking development and landscape transformation whilst embedding local people in the decisions which deeply impact their lives.”
The project clearly demonstrated the interest that the public have in archaeology – 970 applications were received for 100 spots – and the power of crowdsourced archaeological participation.
Interested? Click here to learn more about Placemaker or get in touch with us at [email protected].
Whether you want to schedule a 45-minute demo or just discuss your project, our team are on hand to answer any enquiries.
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