GIS and Scale, Attempt 2

Last week, I made an attempt at a short paper that I plan to deliver at the EAAs next week. I was sort of ambivalent about the paper largely because I got hung up on the idea that scale is a problem in archaeology. To be clear, I still think that moving between scales in archaeology is a challenge and that platforms promising  to integrate information compiled at different scales remain subject to certain limits. That being said,issues of standardization that allow for the integration of data across regions, sites, methods, and scale have to be weighed carefully against the distinctive character of individual datasets, regional practices, and the integrity of the site and its relationship to place.

With these concerns in mind, I’ve revised the 6-minute paper substantially leaving some echo of my anxiety about scale, but I also wandered across some better known ground that considers whether the scale possible through big data and the powers of GIS to allow us to “see like a state” can actually address the most pressing issues of our day. The only thing is that I don’t really say that.

Anyway, here’s what I do say: 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by Jorge Luis Borges one-paragraph story, “On Exactitude in Science.” It tells the well-knowns story of the Cartographers Guild who produced a map of the Empire at the scale of 1:1. The map, of course, was useless, but “in the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.”

I never think of this map more than when wandering the Greek countryside having studied a trusty 1:5000 map, only to discover that the map hid a 3-meter cliff between two sections of otherwise gentle incline.

Archaeology, of course, has long concerned itself with scale. Scale is sometimes dictated by the tools that we use to produce the images, measurements, and analyses through which we develop our arguments for life in the past. Depending on the purpose, a 1945 air photo or Corona satellite image, for example, maybe nearly unusable or a brilliant window into a past landscape. As an archaeologist concerned primarily with regional scale survey, I tend to find frequent parallels between the scale of maps, aerial and satellite photographs, and my own work. It should hardly surprise anyone that ways of seeing (and dividing and documenting) the landscape that developed in the late 20th century would align comfortably with tools designed to allow us to “see like a state.” Millimeters and centimeters rarely concern us much when our study area is measured in tens of square kilometers and survey units measured in thousands of square meters.

Numerous scholars have noted how the elevated viewing position reinforces the ideological baggage of the cartographic gaze. To that we can add, that the current suite of GIS tools streamline our ability to manage and analyze the kind of data that regional survey (or really any regional scale project) produces. Linked data standards, big data hubs, and an increasingly sophisticated geospatial toolkit provide a growing infrastructure of producing and analyzing patterns at a massive scale.

The strength of most GIS software lies in its ability to integrate significant quantities of information into a modern view of the landscapes. Like excavation itself, the most common application of GIS software transforms information into superimposable “layers.” The layers presented by most GIS applications are, like strata in excavation, representative of discrete processes, relationships, or chronologies that gain meaning through their juxtaposition. This tidiness makes the information presented by GIS legible, but also static much as a Harris Matrix (or intensive survey unit) obscures the dynamic processes within and between stratigraphic layers. In other words, the scale at which GIS can operate comes at the sacrifice of certain ways of representing time.

As Ömür Harmanşah has pointed out, an archaeology of the Anthropocene, for example, will require more nimble tools that can move not only between spatial scales, but also integrate the daily life of communities and, even, individuals with expansive global patterns. GIS applications remain oddly incompatible with narratives and story-telling that frames so many of our individual experiences of the landscape. In my research on the archaeology of workforce house in the Bakken oil patch of western North Dakota, for example, the global scale of modern extractive industries and oil production sits awkwardly beside the personal narrative of the Bakken workforce whose view of the landscape is shaped by their experiences, sense of place, and idea of home and work. Mapping these views onto a landscape in an archaeologically meaningful way so that they contribute to how we understand the character and structure of workforce housing in the region means superimposing the Persian Gulf, Idaho, West Texas, Arkansas and Wyoming onto the landscape of the North Dakota prairie. Just as the Dakota Access Pipeline transgressed the Lakota landscape, jeopardized the waters of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and fed both refineries and our own, insatiable thirst for oil, so it traversed the eminently mappable spaces of townships, county, and state.

To return to Borges map, then, it seems like the beggars and animals who inhabited the tattered efforts of the Cartographers Guild might have something to offer us despite their ignorance of geography. These beggars and animals in the Deserts of the West remind us of the limits of our maps and their frequent incommensurability with life on the ground.