Our paper will start from exploring briefly the situation of GIS applications in the archaeological research
fieldwork at the beginning of our century, looking at the capabilities and limits until now reached and discovered and
will continue by proposing a new theoretical and practical Object-Oriented relational approach for the study of complex
archaeological landscapes. Most of archaeologists have been captured finally by new computing technologies believing
stili now that sophistication of powerful and expensive GIS software will be enough for high quality outputs and high
levels of interpretation. For us, GIS is a set of techniques that at this stage help archaeologists to visualize and to
manage huge amounts of georeferenced data and to execute some basic spatial analyses.
Spatial Analysis offers several tools to allow archaeologists to move to more complex explanations.
Therefore, the purpose of our paper will be to show how with well defined archaeological problems and starting from a
well based theory, we can integrate some already existing tools in a GIS framework, moving in such way from beautiful
images to complex analyses. Nowadays, most of GIS based archaeological projects are simple databases with a discrete
representation of archaeological data in a 2D static space, with functionalities limited to primitive geometric operations
used for the calculation of simple and basic relationships or for execute queries and summary descriptions between
points (sites) or lines (ancient roads, streams, etc.) or areas (artifact concentrations) in a space. The result is that we
have GIS used for the inputs of a huge quantities of data indiscriminately over a map, producing as final results a lot of
maps but a lack of theories or hypotheses about the kind of problems archaeologists need to solve and about the
relationships between spatial data.
On the other hand, archaeologists are working today almost only with environmental variables (topography, lithology,
hydrology, etc.) of an area forgetting the importance of social relationships and their interactions in the analyses.
Our paper will finally focus on the hypothesis to introduce some elements able to develop a "theory of spatial
relationships" needed to study human activities and social spaces. So, we propose a multidimensional and an Object-
Oriented Relational approach in order to define and integrate in a GIS framework "activity areas" starting at a first level
from the basic features found by archaeologists during the survey (some post-holes, a grave, a hearth, an artifact
concentration, etc), anyway considered as "activity features ", and working on the relationships between them, in order
to define other more complex levels of analyses. At the end, the purpose of our work is to demonstrate how it is
possible to build a pattern of social interactions between different "activity features" (units), starting from a well
defined archaeological theory, creating an Object-Oriented model, and integrating some already existing analytical tools
in a GIS software (geo-statistic, intra-site spatial testing, visibility, etc.) in order, in such a way, to better define and
clarify an historical reading of the archaeological landscape