Inglämnlagare: a tool for restructuring Swedish HER record site data for statistical analysis.

Area of Science:

• Archaeology
• Computer Science
• Digital Humanities

Background:

• The Swedish National Heritage Board launched a new Historic Environment Record database in 2018 with a revised data model.
• This new model required new methods for accessing and analyzing information on ancient remains.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present Ingämnlagare, an open-source software tool designed for restructuring Swedish ancient remains data.
• To facilitate more efficient research and analysis of the Historic Environment Record.

Main Methods:

• The Ingämnlagare tool is written in Python and utilizes multicore processing for performance.
• Regular expressions are employed to extract specific features from composite archaeological sites.
• Extracted data is formatted into comma-separated value files for further analysis.

Main Results:

• Ingämnlagare successfully restructures complex data from the Swedish Historic Environment Record.
• The tool enables efficient exploration and analysis of specific features, such as rectangular graves.
• Data visualization and preparation steps using QGIS are demonstrated.

Conclusions:

• Ingämnlagare significantly improves accessibility to Swedish ancient sites data for researchers.
• The open-source tool exemplifies effective data wrangling for archaeological research and analysis.
• This approach makes data suitable for both online dissemination and in-depth study.