<< Feature Articles >> A tale of two armchair stone hunters
Submitted by Andy B on Monday, 27 September 2010 Page Views: 2588
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I have a fairly substantial collection of megalithic stones books, particularly for France, which mostly just sit on shelves gathering dust. But now I had lots of time to do something with them. So I spent my injury time going through some of these books, and entering the new megalithic sites into a spreadsheet which could be uploaded to the Megalithic Portal's ancient site database with the help of Andy B.
However book listings don't usually tell you where the sites are very clearly. So the time consuming, and perhaps most necessary part of this data collection, was to identify just where these ancient sites are.
In most cases, I was able to identify the local community or nearest village within which the site was to be found, and by use of Multimap, Google Maps and Wikipedia, was able to locate these communities and get latitude and longitude positions for them. Although not totally accurate for finding the megalithic site on the ground, it at least allows the sites to get plotted on the Megalithic Map, and get linked in to all the other sites in the Megalithic Portal's database, and appear as a site page with all of the other linked in features we provide, such as the maps, various aerial views, nearby sites, and geographically linked pictures from the web. The location I've given will get you pretty close, then - as you will know - if in doubt, ask the locals.
I decided to started with a book I have listing several hundred megalithic burial chambers within the Extremadura region of Spain, which was prompted by some fabulous pictures being sent in around that time by Drew Parsons. While looking to find any details for some of these on the web. One thing I found was a website listing the names of several hundred Spanish and Portuguese "Castros", which is a type of ancient hilltop habitation unique to the Iberian peninsula, with most of them concentrated in the Galicia region at the north west of Spain. So I moved on to listing and hunting down these. After a couple of weeks, I had just about finished them all, a total of 871 new sites to add, before my next visit to the doctor, expecting to be told I should go back to work.
Rather than telling me I could return to work, my doctor insisted that I stay home for another week or two, to prevent further injury, and still not to move from a seated position. There was only one thing I could do, which was to continue researching additional sites for the Megalithic Portal. So I moved on to what is perhaps my primary interest, which is French megalithic sites. Despite adding several thousand of these back in 2004/2005, I knew that there were thousands more out there ready to be identified, and that now was the time to start working through some more of my collection of books.
Many of the new French sites I have added have been identified from what I call my "big blue book of French dolmens", which I have had for many years, and in many ways inspired me to research French megalithic sites for the portal all those years ago, and became a good companion to me throughout my 5 months French trip in 2005. At last I had the time to try and do the book and the sites in it the justice they deserve. Again, the hunting down and locating of the sites was as mentioned above, but with the additional help of Geoportail, upon which highly detailed maps of the whole of France can be viewed.
From this, accurate site positions can be obtained for any marked on the French maps. Of course, many of the sites marked on the maps have been already included within the Portal's database from our previous research. This leaves the new sites I identified mostly only identified to nearest village standard. This took me much of the remainder of my injury time, and by the time I stopped, I had made a listing of a further 951 French sites.
These sites have now all been added to the Portal for the public to share, and hopefully visit and send us descriptions, pictures, and more accurate positional data.
I still have many more books and website leads within my collection, but in many ways I am hoping that they stay there gathering dust for many more years. I do not want to find myself housebound for any length of time again soon!
Martyn 'The Captain'
Our second 'Armchair Stone hunter' is Holger Rix. He is the brains and eyes behind adding around 2000 sites from Denmark to our database over the summer, based on publicaly available data on Fund og Fortidsminder from www.kulturarv.dk
Holger describes briefly what he did:
First off, I downloaded the original database with all the Danish sites.
I filtered the sites, first for 'Megalitgrav'
One of the problems was that they list every tomb, so if there is a Long Barrow with three chambers, you got three Megalitgrav! This took some processing to reduce the multiple entries.
Second, there was no name of the site, so I had to grab the info pages from the server as well.
Then I had to write a 'stack' (a macintosh HyperCard term) that brings the data together and proofs all this.
The script went through the single lines and grabbed the location, whilst proofing if the entry is a double or not. If it is a single Megalitgrav, it grabs the Sites name (Generated from the villages name, and the kind of tomb) from the sites infopage.
Then I generated a GoogleEarth kml file, plus an Excel sheet from the data.
Once I had done this I had to go line by line through the sheet, and compare to the site in GoogleEarth. If in doubt, I could also pop up the sites info page from the danish server. And so, one by one, I could validate the Site names.
In the end I filled the data into the Excel sheets used to send the data to Andy B.
Before the Danish server was closed down, I managed only to extract the data for the 'cists'. There was a lot more to extract, like Stone Alignments and Stone Circles, also the Long Barrows were extra.
What I have managed is a complete GoogleEarth kml file, with:
1. Rundhøj (uncountable, maybe some 21.000)
2. Megalitgrav
3. Langhøj
4. Stenkiste
5. Begravelse
6. Brandgrav
7. Stenbygget Grav
8. Gravrøse
10. Jordfaestegrav
11. Bautasten
12. Billedsten
13. Bygningsten
14. Helleristning
15. Runesten
16. Skåltegn
17. Stenlægning
18. Stenrække
19. Stensættning
and then some.
The Google Earth KML file is only 1,5MB in size (compressed) and can be downloaded from here
We then chose the sites in the best state of preservation (around 2000) to import to the Megalithic Portal. We had to convert these site types to their nearest Megalithic Portal equivalent to import them. Martin L helped with the data checking as well.
Once Andy had them all in a spreadsheet then it was over to his time-honoured Perl script to convert them into SQL database format for mass loading of all the sites in one go. Then finally there's some clever trigonometry from Klingon to work out the 'nearest sites' so that these can be displayed on each Site Page.
And that is a behind the scenes look at how a group of us added almost 4000 sites from France, Portugal, Spain and Denmark.
You can browse sites in the various countries from our Text Browse page. We would appreciate some photos of these new sites if you can find them - there's a challenge for you!
Note: A look at how the Megalithic Portal team managed to add almost 4000 sites from across four European countries
Protonuraghi - the oldest nuragic constructions of Bronze Age Sardinia >>
We would like to know more about this location. Please feel free to add a brief description and any relevant information in your own language.
Wir möchten mehr über diese Stätte erfahren. Bitte zögern Sie nicht, eine kurze Beschreibung und relevante Informationen in Deutsch hinzuzufügen.
Nous aimerions en savoir encore un peu sur les lieux. S'il vous plaît n'hesitez pas à ajouter une courte description et tous les renseignements pertinents dans votre propre langue.
Quisieramos informarnos un poco más de las lugares. No dude en añadir una breve descripción y otros datos relevantes en su propio idioma.