Managing the intangible with ATLAS.ti©. Methods and tools for archaeological research of sensory conTexts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/21279Keywords:
Intangible heritage, Cognitive archaeology, ATLAS.ti, Textual analysis, AIUCD 2024Abstract
This work takes as its starting point the most recent issues emerged in the field of Cognitive Archaeology by proposing an experimental method of spatial analysis that adopts two main measuring instruments: the human body and software. The specific aim is to understand archaeological contexts not only with traditional methodologies, but also by working through behavioural analogies between the present and the past. Borrowing methods and procedures from cognitive science for the acquisition of qualitative data, the research involved a selected group of people who were subjected to a sensory experiment within particular archaeological contexts, the natural caves. The texts of the dense descriptions and questionnaires filled in by the participants were thus analysed with the help of the qualitative-quantitative analysis software ATLAS.ti©.
The purposes of this paper are many: first of all, it is intended to present the ATLAS.ti software, which is widely used in sociology but almost unknown among archaeologists; its effectiveness is then demonstrated by dealing with its application on a specific case study of cognitive archaeology; finally, it offers a contribution to the debate on the development of digital tools and technologies that are increasingly suitable for answering archaeological questions, especially those related to the semantic understanding of space, which often escape the materiality of data.
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