Introduction

Vast volumes of data are created every year in contract archaeology. To unlock the potential for knowledge-making from this information, it is necessary to make it possible to reuse and aggregate information from heterogeneous sources. This data is usually unstandardised and difficult to use, and thus, seldom used where the results from different excavations need to be used in combination. The information that contains the empirical base for archaeology, that is, the material remains of past human activities, cannot efficiently contribute to archaeological knowledge production. This chapter explore how it might be possible to rework archaeological GIS data for reuse in research. The scope is to make it possible to use this exhaustive body of information for analyses that go beyond the scope of a single excavation or project. If archaeologists could use all the information produced in a structured way to explore the historical processes behind the data, it would be possible to start asking a whole range of new questions. For such analysis to reach full potential, it will also be necessary to adapt new methods for data analysis, building on the development of computational methods for exploring large datasets.