Digital Preservation and Spatial Representation at the Washington Square Mound Site (41NA49), Nacogdoches County, Texas

Abstract

Thirty-one years of excavations at the Washington Square Mound site (41NA49) have produced a large number of artifacts, excavation records, field notes, photographs, slides, maps, excavation profiles, and plan view maps. This article is the product of an effort to synthesize the aforementioned information for the initial field school which occurred in the summer of 1979. Through the use of geographic information systems (GIS), a digital grid was constructed atop aerial photography to house the digitized information within a spatial representation of the provenience from which it was recovered. This allows a query of the artifact catalog to produce the spatial distribution of artifact categories across the site, and provides access to all associated information.