Heritage GIS Architecture & Fundamentals
Scalable, reproducible spatial infrastructure: CRS rigor, governance, metadata, and orchestration patterns for archaeological research.
Archaeological & Heritage GIS Workflows Automation
Automated workflows for archaeologists, heritage managers, and Python GIS developers.
Archaeological projects accumulate complex spatial records across field campaigns, photogrammetric reconstructions, laboratory catalogues, and regulatory deliverables. This resource collects production-grade patterns for engineering those workflows into reproducible, audit-ready pipelines.
Written for archaeologists, heritage managers, Python GIS developers, and academic research teams. Every guide targets a discrete operational step — from CRS hygiene and PostGIS schema design, to drone flight planning, point-cloud classification, orthomosaic tiling, statutory boundary validation, and offline mobile field sync.
Three core areas
Architectures, pipelines, and databases for heritage spatial work
The site is organised around three core areas that mirror the lifecycle of a heritage GIS programme: foundations and governance, 3D documentation pipelines, and the spatial databases that hold the evidence. Each opens onto detailed workflow guides — from field capture and flight planning through to compliance reporting.
Photogrammetry & 3D Site Mapping Pipelines
Drone ingestion, dense reconstruction, UV-aware texturing, and batch orchestration for production-grade 3D site mapping.
- Automated Drone Image Processing Workflows
- Batch Processing Photogrammetry Datasets
- Drone Flight Planning for Photogrammetric Survey: Grid Design, Overlap, and Ground Sample Distance
- Exporting 3D Models to Spatial Databases for Heritage Archives
- Mesh Generation & Optimization for Ruins
- Orthomosaic Generation and Tiling for Archaeological Site Maps
- Point Cloud Processing and Classification for Archaeological Site Recording
- Texture Mapping & UV Alignment Automation
Artifact & Feature Spatial Database Design
PostGIS schemas, topological modelling, attribute synchronization and query optimization for multi-season excavation datasets.
Start here
Featured deep-dive guides
New to the site? These hands-on tutorials are the most requested, end-to-end walkthroughs — each one solves a single concrete problem with runnable code you can adapt today.
Calculating Image Overlap and Ground Sample Distance for Site Survey
Before a serpentine grid can be laid or a corridor buffered, the survey needs a single quantitative anchor: the ground sample distance that the flight will…
Ground Classification with PDAL Pipelines
Separating ground from everything else is the single most consequential decision in point-cloud processing for archaeology. Every bare-earth model, every…
Validating Features Against Scheduled Monument Boundaries
When an excavation trench or a recorded artifact falls inside — or within the consultation buffer of — a scheduled monument, that fact must be established…
Packaging Offline Field Projects with QFieldSync
When a survey team drives out to a scheduled monument with no mobile coverage, the tablet has to hold everything: the editable layers, the attribute forms,…
Generating Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF Orthomosaics
A finished site orthomosaic that lives as a plain GeoTIFF is an archival liability: to draw any corner of it, a client must open and parse the whole file,…
How to Configure EPSG Codes for Regional Heritage Mapping: Debugging, Validation & Automation
Regional heritage mapping pipelines frequently fracture at the coordinate reference system (CRS) boundary. When archaeological survey data, LiDAR…
What you will find
Concrete patterns, runnable code, and compliance-aware decisions
Each article ships Python snippets, SQL fragments, and architectural diagrams that can be lifted directly into production. Code blocks include a copy button and inline checklists are interactive — tick items off as you implement them.