Search

The archaeological site of Sovjan is situated on the edge of the Korce Basin, southeastern Albania. Its remarkably long and well investigated stratigraphic sequence, spanning from the Neolithic till the Iron Age, makes it an important type- and reference-site for the whole region. At different periods of prehistory it was located on the shores of the former Lake Maliq that once filled the Korce Basin, but was definitely drained in the 1940′s. These permanent wetland conditions on the site allowed for a high degree of preservation of organic material, especially wood. Based on the current knowledge, level 8 of Sovjan contains the best-preserved wooden material of all the Early Bronze Age sites in the Balkans. Through the combination of dendrochronology and Bayesian modelling, i.e. wiggle-matching, a floating 269-years long tree-ring chronology was constructed, with an absolute end-date range falling between 2158 and 2142 cal BC (2σ). It was possible to establish that the dwellings and the trackway associated with the last occupation phase of level 8 are contemporaneous. Additionally, with the help of the new dendrochronological data and based on previously published charcoal dates, the absolute chronology of the subsequent level 7 is being narrowed-down to a range from the mid-22nd to mid-20th c. cal BC (2σ). The Early Bronze Age layers of the archaeological site of Sovjan, which are particularly pertinent for the 3rd millennium chronology of the southwestern Balkans, can now be dated with high precision for the first time and hence offer a major chronological reference point in the region.

The free and Open Source geographic information systems made a breakthrough during the last twenty years. Those softwares are more and more efficient and help the field of archeology to treat data by taking in account spatial data and textual data. These new tools, sponsored by international firms (like Google) and consortium (Open Geospatial Consortium), don’t have to envy their concurrents. The French School of Athens begins a project of using geographic information systems in order to make easier the protect and the sharing of data. This master thesis makes a summary of five months of work to on the installation of Web-GIS for the archeological sites of Dikili-Tash in Greece and Sovjan in Albania.; Le bond en avant initié par les logiciels libre et Open Source offre un nouvel horizon à l’archéologie. Ces logiciels gratuits et de plus en plus performants dotent le milieu de l’archéologie d’un outil de traitement de données alliant l’information attributaire et l’information spatiale. Ces nouveaux outils supportés par des organismes internationaux (Open Geospatial Consortium) et des grandes filiales (Google) n’ont rien à envier à « leurs concurrents propriétaires ». L’École française d’Athènes s’est donc lancée dans un le projet ambitieux de développer l’usage des systèmes d’information géographique basés sur le web pour faciliter le partage des données et leur accès. Ce mémoire dresse les étapes nécessaires à la mise en place d’un tel projet pour les sites archéologiques de Dikili-Tash en Grèce et de Sovjan en Albanie.