1st year report - Poznan Archaeological Muzeum part

Andrzej Prinke
Poznan Archaeological Museum

1. Aerial photo database – software

The planned database application APh_Max has been designed, executed and tested. It is now ready to use for mass data entry, first of all - of the ca 3.000 air photos from the area of Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) region, collected at the Institute of Prehistory, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Any bugs encountered at this stage will be immidiately eliminated. APh_Max application is the next module of the SMR database management system that has been developed since several years at Poznan Archaelogical Museum. It should enhance the managemant of air photo collections through the creation of unique file for each photograph that can be then compared with other SMR data sets (text description of archaeological sites, GIS data).

A single record contains two groups of data:

(1) elements facilitating site identification (according to archaeological, administrative and geographical criteria among others).

(2) film description (information, which refers to the conditions of conducting the aerial reconnaissance: pilot's and photographer's names, date of taking the photo, inventory number of film and frames, archive etc. ).

The photograph alone may be entered in the database as a source material i.e. as a graphic file suitable for further processing. The database contents can be searched and sorted with help of two options: Analysis and Query . The user can find, organize and view the data according to the chosen criteria. One may choose between simple analysis (to create a dictionary of values from chosen fields) and complex analysis (to find all cases of coexistence of chosen features). Search results may be saved in a file (in format *.DBF or *.XLS), or also printed in a tabular form.

2. WEB publication of German military photo-maps

During the World War II German military and intelligence services had taken at least hundreds of aerial photographs covering Polish territory. Thus, German archives from the late 1930s and early 1940s contained vast amount of 1:25.000-scale photo-maps, compiled from vertical air photos. For most of the resources were seized by the American and British forces, the first interest of Polish team would be to gather all information about its present whereabouts, including the search in local and national archives across Europe. The main goal however is to make those resources widely available on the web sites, by the publication of both digital scans of the photo-maps and created databases. So far, several indexes of the localized and identified map sheets have been prepared and published on the WEB page of the project (see below).

3. WEB page of the project

Preliminary version of the WWW page presents the results of the first year activities of three Polish partners: Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poznan Archaeological Museum and Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. It contains a choice of air photos from several regions of Poland, being result of archaeological air reconaissances, a short presentation of APh_Max software application (see p. 1) and indexes of German photo-maps from WWII (see p. w).