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edition, which comprises Geoffrey of Monmouth’s translations and retelling of ancient British legends from written Cymric and Breton sources into medieval Latin. The Breton language, used by the inhabitants of Brittany in france, and Cymric, or Welsh, were almost identical at the time that Geoffrey of Monmouth was working on his book and up until the reign of Henry I, when substantial differences between the two languages occurred.
Geoffrey’s sources for his work included manuscripts from the tenth century, such as the Latin “Nennius,” which is extant, and a book of Breton legends, which has since vanished. The latter was the source of the story of the descent of British princes from the fugitives of Troy, a legend that is also common in stories about the origins of the Franks in Gaul; the story seems to have become popular in both countries after the invasion of the Teutonic tribes in the sixth century. Although the legends were not recorded by the historian Bede in his eighth-century chronicle, they were part of written history by the ninth century.
The publication of Historia Regum Britanniae marks a milestone in the literary history of Europe. Within fifty years of its completion, stories about the Holy Grail, Lancelot, Tristan, Perceval, and the Round Table had appeared, and Merlin and Arthur had become as popular in Germany and Italy as they were in England and France. The book was later translated into Anglo-Norman, and 100 years later into English. The material was then used by a long line of famous British storytellers and historians such as Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Holinshed, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Sir Thomas Malory, Wordsworth, and Tennyson.
As important as its long-term impact on European civilization was the book’s short-term influence on the people of England, which included a large part of France at the time. The popularity of the work’s legends and stories helped to defuse racial animosities among Welsh, Breton, British, French, and Teuton, and the various groups became more politically unified through their mutual belief in a shared origin.
Archaeologists, like geographers, think spatially, and both make sense of their data by referring to its spatial dimension. Archaeology—particularly European archaeology—has been closely linked to geography and has borrowed from it methodological principles to develop its own theoretical tenets. This close association with geography dates from the formal mapping methods of attributes and artifacts developed by the Austro-German school of “anthropogeographers” of the 1880s and 1890s. However it is with the Cambridge School of New Geography, and in particular with Peter Haggett’s Locational Analysis in Human Geography (1965), Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett’s Models in Geography (1967), and Michael Chisholm’s Rural Settlement and Land Use (1968) that the otherwise implied sway of geography toward archaeology was formalized. This influence is best reflected in the archaeologists Claudio Vita-Finzi’s and eric higgs’s 1970 site catchment analysis of Mount Carmel, Ian Hodder and Clive Orton’s Spatial Models in Archaeology (1976), and david clarke’s Spatial Archaeology (1977).
More recently, geography is once more leaving its mark on the theoretical development of archaeology. The emergence of landscape archaeology, a derivation of geography’s landscape theory, has re-ignited interest in the spatial associations between archaeological sites and their physical environment on both sides of the Atlantic. Within this context, the application of geographic information systems (GIS) has been hailed as the new paradigm. But just how much can the application of GIS assist in the interpretation of the archaeological data? Before attempting to answer this question a brief review on the development of gis is necessary.
Reflecting about the complexity of archaeological data, David Clarke declared in 1977 that the analysis of the spatial relationships of artifact and site distribution could no longer be done by intuitive methods such as simple visual inspection, or “eyeballing.” The challenge, then, was to develop the methodological tools that would
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