A dig in archive. The case of Herdonia

Since 2004 the Department of Humanities at the University of Foggia has held the historical archive of Herdonia, contai- ning the documentation of archaeological research carried out in the Roman town of Northern Apulia from 1963 to 2000. The story hidden in the archive is long and complex, written in the documentation produced during 40 years of excavation and survey that led to the discovery of one of the largest Daunian, Roman and medieval sites in southern Italy. The archive is a unique memory covering a long time-span, containing documents that are parts of the history of archaeological research, linked with various methodologies (from long trenches and Wheeler methodology to big areas) and realized using different techniques and technologies (from paper drawings to CAD models, to 3D scans). The purpose of activities carried out at the Digital Archaeology Lab is to share all the documents of the Herdonia archive starting from spatial data, carrying out specific workflows for building a common environment in which the digitized legacy data and digital born data can stay together. The first phase of the project has been thus the recovering all the hand-drawn maps, their digitizing and georeferencing in an open source GIS. For the first time all of the sectors and trenches dug up on the site of Herdonia stay together, georeferenced, under the same roof.