Stuart Eve writes: I present an application of embodied GIS undertaken within the Bronze Age landscape of Leskernick Hill, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. [Geographical Information System, or 'database with map interface' - in this case one you can carry round on an iPad- MegP Ed] Leskernick Hill nestles in the north-eastern part of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. It is an unimposing hill, dwarfed, overlooked and virtually enclosed by a ring of surrounding hills.
The advent of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in the UK brought the construction of various different types of ritual or ceremonial monuments, including long cairns, stone rows, stone circles and hill-top enclosures, many of which are found on Bodmin Moor and Leskernick Hill. As the late Neolithic transitions into the Bronze Age, we also begin to find widespread evidence of permanent and substantial domestic settlement areas, enclosures, fields and cultivation of the land.
As part of previous research, I undertook a formal experiment to investigate the effectiveness of using visual augmentation in the embodied GIS to provide a feeling of presence in the landscape and to assess whether the embodied GIS helps in identifying the location, size and shape of the Bronze Age houses. The experiment is explored in full elsewhere (Leskernick Hill Settlement - A house with a view? - Eve 2014 - see link below).
A 'traditional' GIS model of the hill was created, with two viewing areas specified. These locations were chosen as they have different perspectives on the rest of the settlement. House 50 stands slightly apart and has a view up a slope to the rest of the houses. House 35 is part of a cluster of houses, and was chosen to explore the feeling of being deep within the settlement. A series of tests were undertaken using different parameters from both viewing areas, where the participants were asked to count the number of houses they thought they could see without augmentation, with augmentation using small white spheres, and finally with fully rendered Bronze Age house reconstructions being augmented via the iPad screen, sized to fit the traces of the houses on the ground.
More at
http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue44/3/4-1.html
An extract from The Embodied GIS. Using Mixed Reality to explore multi-sensory archaeological landscapes - Stuart Eve
Lots more Digital Creativity in the latest issue of Internet Archaeology.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road