Experimental Verification of a Hypothesis in Archaeology Based on the 3-dimensional Digital Terrain Data

摘要

Geographical data are very important in archaeological study. Most of the geographical data which have been recorded so for include positions of sites and remains. These have been represented by characters, texts or two-dimensional distribution maps. Three-dimensional geographical data have never been introduced because they need a huge amount of memory space and computing time. In recent days, technical environment for geographical information system (GIS) have rapidly been improved and three-dimensional geographical data can easily be obtained, so that we can introduce them into archaeological study. This paper presents an experimental verification of a hypothesis in archaeology by use of the three-dimensional geographical data. The hypothesis is that the hill-forts were built for ancient beacon telecommunication. These sites lived between the Middle Yayoi Period and the Late Yayoi Period (100AD-300AD). We built a terrain space in computer, in which our experiment has been done for evaluating visibilities between sites. Although our experiment can not directly pro- vide a proof of the hypothesis, it has indicated that GIS will be a useful tool to support a type of model-based reasoning in archaeology.