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The Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences has opened access to the geoinformation system "Archaeological Monuments of Russia" — an electronic map that contains data on more than 42.5 thousand objects.

In 2014, a working group led by the Director of the IA RAS Nikolai Makarov began to develop a nationwide electronic archaeological map. An automated information processing system and a database were created for it, in which data on archaeological monuments from scientific reports stored in the archive of the IA RAS were entered.

Now the database contains information about a variety of archaeological monuments — ancient settlements, burial mounds, underground burial grounds, settlements, parking lots, stone sculptures, rock carvings, cultural layers and other objects that archaeologists studied on the territory of our country in the post-war twentieth anniversary and in 2009-2014, 2019.

The electronic map is constantly updated: data on archaeological sites surveyed in 1966-2007 and 2015-2021 are added to the database. A separate area of work is the clarification of the locations of monuments discovered in the post-war years: during this period, it was customary to give a description of the location of the monument approximately, with reference to the nearest settlement. To solve this problem, archaeologists have developed a method for reconstructing the location of monuments. studied in 1944-1965.

Now all the archaeological monuments, the information about which has already been processed, are displayed in an interactive map on the website of the IA RAS. Monuments are grouped by subjects of the Russian Federation, and their detailing is possible at the level of federal districts-subjects of the Russian Federation-districts, for this you just need to change the scale of the map. The Yandex.Maps or Open Street Map services are used as a cartographic basis. The management of the map corresponds to working with these services, and therefore any user can easily cope with it. You can choose different layers as a substrate: a map, a satellite, or a hybrid. Some objects (most often well-known archaeological monuments) have a monument passport attached to them on the map: a description that includes the name, type of object, chronological attribution, cultural affiliation, and a link to the nearest locality. Each description contains hyperlinks to scientific reports on the study of the monument, news, scientific and popular science literature. The map is equipped with a system of filters, with which each user can build their own map. In addition to the scale, you can set your own parameters by type of monument, by epoch and eventually get the desired selection: for example, get a map of all Stone Age sites on the territory of the Perm Region or a map of settlements and settlements throughout the country.

"The creation of an archaeological map of Russia, including all known archaeological sites, is one of the large-scale tasks that appeared in Russian archeology since the first attempts of the Imperial Archaeological Commission to collect materials for accounting and statistics of points "remarkable in archaeological terms". But the implementation of this task invariably encountered obstacles due to both the uncertainty of the methodological principles underlying the collection of materials, and the gigantic scale of the planned work. The electronic map created on a national scale will allow solving various tasks in the field of preserving the archaeological heritage and will collect the necessary array of information necessary for studying the settlement system in different regions of the country in different periods, and will also become the basis for predictive modeling of the spatial distribution of archaeological monuments, which is necessary for conducting field research at the modern level," says Nikolai Makarov, director of the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Source: polit.ru,sci-dig.ru