Geospatial Mapping

Understanding where your project fits in time and space can be vital for heritage planning and assessing the potential for encountering archaeological resources.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide the platform for analysing historic changes of a specific property or region.  Old maps, city plans and archival blueprints are valuable sources of information for understanding and representing changes in an area through time.  These spatial diagrams can be georeferenced by stretching and orienting them to natural landmarks and built-features on modern maps and satellite imagery.

Georeferenced spatial data can be added in layers to reconstruct changes through time, including road alignments, urban expansion and renewal, and landscape models showing natural features as they once appeared, such as shoreline erosion or waterbodies prior to hydro development.  We rely on these data sets to inform our project background studies and guide field interpretation of features and cultural elements we encounter on site.  We also use GIS to produce detailed and dynamic figures in our reports to illustrate the relationship between our clients’ vision of the future in context with the past.