This project was created to automate the cleaning and integration of the Sikyon data into a usable format for the purpose of publication and interpretation. It was primarily written in 2008 and with the benefit of hindsight, in a rather sloppy and unfortunate way. The point of this code being "published" on GitHub is not for ridicule or self-deprecation, but rather to provide the original code to anyone wishing to challenge or reinterpret the conclusions from the Sikyon Survey monograph.
Revisiting this code in preparation for "publication" has brought on feelings of bemusement and minor revulsion. And while it would be very easy to refactor the majority of the bad practice, antipatterns, and general ugliness out of the code, I felt it was important to leave the code as it was when it originally processed the data used in the analysis and interpretation for the publication. In this way, there is no chance of an inadvertent modification to the logic which would in turn alter the processing of the data.
Lots of stuff was just hardcoded, such as paths and configuration details. The database paths which referenced the original locations on my old Linux workstation have been left in for reference, although they are obviously totally irrelevant. The original project was created in Netbeans, but all traces of Netbeans specific stuff has been removed. There is also not a single test that graces this project, it was tested and validated cowboy style on copies of the database.
Having said all of that, the code enabled an efficient and repeatable way to process the original survey data in a way that benefited the archaeologists trying to understand the site. The monograph this code and data helped shape will be published in Meletemata in 2018 by the Greek National Research Foundation. The updated bibliographic reference will be published here when it is available.
The project was a multidisciplinary research program to study the human presence and activity on the plateau of ancient Sikyon, a city in northeastern Peloponnese between Corinth and Achaia. The project ran between the summers of 2004 and 2009 and was undertaken by the University of Thessaly in collaboration with the University of York (UK), the Institute of Mediterranean Studies at FORTH and the 37th Ephoreia of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities.
The primary activity of the project was an urban survey of the ancient city, which quantified and qualified both pottery and architectural observations from the field over the 5 seasons. That data was captured in a database and GIS, which aided the archaeologists in making their interpretation of the ancient city and its use.
Further interpretations and discussions about the Sikyon Survey Project can be found in the project website, or from the following publications:
- Lolos, Y. 2011 'Land of Sikyon: archaeology and history of a Greek city-state', Hesperia suppl. 39.
- Lolos, Y., Gourley, B. and Stewart, D. 2008 'The Sikyon Survey Project: a blueprint for urban survey?', Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 20 (2), 267-96.
- Charno, M. 2007 'An Interactive Image Using SVG and Ajax in Archaeology', Internet Archaeology 23. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.23.5
This project was originally built using Netbeans and Ant, but i've added Maven to the project to make this process (and the overall project structure) more generic.
This library was used to write CSV after parsing and processing data from the database. This can be pulled in from Maven Central.
This library was used to drive JDBC connections to Oracle databases, which was utilised to insert processed data into an Oracle ArcSDE database hosted by the Archaeology Data Service. The loader that does that was used to process the data, associate it with its relative spatial entity, then export the combined data as an ESRI Shapefile for use in desktop GIS.
A library is necessary to create a JDBC connection to an MS Access database. A example product that is available commercially is the HXTT JDBC Driver for Access. To add this to your project to re-run the scripts, purchase a license from HXTT and download the JAR. Once downloaded add it to your local maven repository with:
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=com.hxtt.sql.access -DartifactId=accessjdbc4 \
-Dversion=v5.1 -Dpackaging=jar -Dfile=Access_JDBC40.jar -DgeneratePom=true
Then add the following to your pom.xml dependencies entry:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.hxtt.sql.access</groupId>
<artifactId>accessjdbc4</artifactId>
<version>v5.1</version>
</dependency>
There are also other libraries available, such as UCanAccess.
To run the scripts, you can simply run the main method in any of the classes in the scripts package. These scripts were used to get some data out of a database, process/clean it, then reinsert the data back in the database or create an export. The available scripts are:
DBCLeaner: A utility script to correct or update Tract & Square IDsDensityBuilder: A script to build raw and visibility corrected densities values for each SquareMainDatabase: A script to create percentages for pottery types, shapes and periods based on square counts, taking into account the idiosyncrasies of each pottery specialists recording techniquePotteryTableBuilder: A script to take pottery data and import it into a geospatial database for rendering in a GISPotteryTableHellenistic: A script to export the specialist Hellenistic pottery data in the pipe delimited formatPotteryTableRoman: A script to clean the Roman pottery data
This code ain't pretty, but it did its job and is now available for others to investigate and re-process as required. It was also written before I discovered Spring and JPA, so be nice...