2010 Abstracts

ESRI International User Conference  (San Diego, California; July 2010)

Reburial Planning Efforts at the Joint Courts Complex Archaeological Project

Stephen McElroy

Data recovery at the Joint Courts Complex Archaeological Project involved the removal of over 1,300 burials from an historic cemetery in downtown Tucson, Arizona. The vast majority of the human remains and associated artifacts were reinterred at another cemetery in Tucson. This paper describes and explains a variety of geographic information system (GIS) methods for converting the spatial layout of the excavated grave pits to a much smaller plot for reburial. A real-world coordinate 40-by-35 grid of cells was created to serve as the index for systematically linking the grave features to their respective reburial boxes. Emphasis was placed on respecting the original spatial relationships among the grave features while minimizing the area required for the reburial plot. Other considerations included the need to transfer the 3-D excavation space into a flat 2-D reburial plot and accommodating the varying number of reburial boxes per grave feature.


Close-Range Photogrammetry Techniques at Joint Courts Complex Archaeological Project

Zeynep Aydin

The Joint Courts Complex Archaeological Project involved data recovery of over 1,300 burials from an historic cemetery in downtown Tucson, Arizona. Preliminary field testing indicated that the application of close-range photogrammetry and digitization would be a viable and time-saving technique to replace hand-drawn in situ plan view maps of human remains. By georeferencing and rectifying digital photographs, we were able to obtain high-quality imagery for the burial features. With a rectified photograph root mean squared error (RMSE) typically less than 1 cm, the subsequent digitization of human remains proved to be extremely accurate in real-world coordinates. During the heads-up digitizing of human remains in ArcGIS, the use of the annotated photographs from the osteologists served as an invaluable guide that enhanced the accuracy of shape, position, and material interpretation.