For a landscape archaeology seminar I’m working my way through material from a survey of Wadi el Hasa by Burton MacDonald et al. I’m especially interested in the medieval and early modern material, in particular whether the seventh century conquest is visible in the archaeological record and how it manifests itself. They found almost no early Islamic material in the area they surveyed, but this goes largely uncommented in a final publication that is focused on significantly earlier periods.

So far I’ve entered potsherd data (site, number of samples, number of sherds) for all of the sites dated from the Byzantine period up to the present into one google doc spreadsheet, and all the site data (location, classification) for the Byzantine period into another. I still need to enter the site data for post-Byzantine sites, but I wanted to get started working on a Processing program to visualize, and eventually analyze this information.

So far, all it does is map the sites, pulling data (only for site location, and therefore currently only for the Byzantine period) dynamically from the google doc when it starts running, and displays them in a 3d environment which you can navigate with the mouse. Hopefully it will do much more, but for two days of data entry and two days of programming (slow learning) it’s not bad:

Elevations

Overhead

Perspectival

The red dot is located in the south-eastern corner, and greener points are lower in elevation, while bluer points are higher.

You can access the site location data in this googledoc spreadsheet.