Celebrating GIS - the technology that keeps on giving

Written By Kari Campbell

Happy GIS Day!

Roger Tomlinson. Image source: Esri

GIS was first developed in 1963 by Roger Tomlinson who used computers to handle map information for the Canadian government.  Since that time, the use of Geographic Information System technology has exploded. According to MarketsandMarkets, the GIS market is expected to reach $14.5 billion by 2025.[1] By 2032, the market is projected to reach about $43.8 billion.[2]

Clearly, GIS is being used for more than mapping land. In fact, GIS now has thousands of applications. One of the beauties of GIS is its versatility and ability to integrate with a wide range of other technologies.

In 1873, Heinrich Schliemann dug a huge trench right through the center of the mound of Troy. This showed that the mound was made up of the layers of successive settlements.

Discovering ancient civilizations

In the late 19th century, the city of Troy was thought to be mythical – a place created in Homer’s imagination to help set his epic poem, The Illiad .

It wasn’t until the 1870s that a German self-taught archeologist named Heinrich Schliemann traveled to Turkey to begin excavation in an area rich in ancient ruins.  Based on advice from a local amateur archeologist, Frank Calvert, he chose a hill named Hissarlik to begin digging.  He dove right into the work and had a trench dug through the hill, uncovering successive civilizations in layers – finally confirming that this hill was indeed the ancient city of Troy as described in Homer’s epic.[3]

Schliemann spent two decades excavating Troy and the work continues to this day.

The power of GIS

The ruins were found in eastern Mexico, in Campeche.

Today, we don’t need to bulldoze likely targets to uncover ancient civilizations. GIS, combined with LiDAR, provides a powerful way to combine maps, data and analytics to uncover what is hidden to the human eye.  This was demonstrated recently in October 2024 when a massive Mayan city was discovered by chance by a student who analyzing LiDAR surveys using GIS.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the United States. It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr. Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed - a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.”[4]

Wait, that’s not all

GIS, combined with RFID is also being applied to help manage archeological digs and to track artifacts from discovery to display. Managing their vast collections of artifacts is a persistent problem for museums and research institutions.  A recent news story highlights the issue. A Danish antiquities dealer with a photographic memory describes seeing an ancient and rare piece of jewelry on e-Bay – a piece he’d remembered seeing in a catalogue from the British Museum. It turns out that he was correct – one of the museum’s curators was illegally selling artifacts online.  His discovery eventually led to an investigation that found that nearly 2,000 items were missing.

As bad as this thievery was, it’s really not that surprising, because the museum does not have a full catalog of all 8 million artifacts [5] in its collection.

Today, there’s an easy solution for this type of problem – GIS and RFID

This approach is already being used to map and manage dinosaur fossils at the Standing Rock Sioux paleontological dig in South Dakota. As fossils are recovered from the site, they are RFID-tagged and logged into ArcGIS using Esri’s Survey123 or FieldMaps. An integrated app, InfraMarker RFID, pulls the tag location data and ties it to the fossil record in GIS.

GIS map of RFID-marked fossil locations in ArcGIS

This RFID tracking means that every item can be identified, verified and tracked throughout its journey from the dig to display. Additionally, if the owners choose to share their data with partner researchers, they can grant access to the GIS database and researchers can view the entire history (including field notes, images, videos and so on) of any fossil and know exactly where it was found and where it is now. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, and GIS paints those pictures with data that allows the view to zoom in on any aspect for a more detailed view. With RFID to tie every data point to a location, the platforms becomes even more powerful.  We look forward to seeing what GIS can show us in the future!

Kari Campbell
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