LAD: Laboratory of Digital Archaeology at Sapienza
LAD: Laboratory of Digital Archaeology at Sapienza promotes research, experimentation, and teaching of digital technologies for archaeology and, more broadly, the humanities. LAD contributes to the development and promotion of FLOS culture (free, libre and open source) and to open-access publication of research data and results.
What we do
LAD experiments with applying technology to archaeological research, in the field and in the lab. Over the last few decades the Internet and its best-known service, the Web, have literally taken over our lives, becoming ever more all-encompassing communication tools — an experience that intensified during the long periods of social isolation caused by the pandemic. For several years now, archaeological research too has experimented with the communication channels offered by the Web, at first purely to reach and grow its audience, and later also to strengthen the research itself. Online databases, WebGIS, cloud computing, and now also artificial intelligence are just some of the keywords becoming increasingly familiar even to "traditional" research.
LAD is dedicated to exploring this potential, building bridges and facilitating exchange between archaeological research and the world of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). LAD therefore seeks to study, investigate, understand, explore, govern, and anticipate what now seems to be the future landscape of our research.
Finally, LAD embraces an ethical view of technological applications, emphasizing transparency of process, sharing, reproducibility, and mutual collaboration. For this reason it focuses primarily on open source technologies and free software. All our projects are distributed under open licenses and published in open-access repositories!
Methods and tools
LAD has built up long experience in designing, creating, and implementing Archaeological Information Systems, experimenting with and consolidating tools for managing relational databases, GIS platforms, WebGIS, and innovative tools for the digital management and publication of archaeological data through Web technologies.
LAD has also built up considerable experience over time in traditional and instrumental archaeological survey, both direct and indirect. Total stations and drones for photogrammetric survey are part of our fieldwork research toolkit.
Here is an unranked, alphabetically ordered list of tools, languages, standards, software, etc. that we're extremely comfortable with and use on a daily basis:
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign, Adobe Photoshop, Agisoft Metashape, ArcGIS, Astro.js, AutoCAD, Bash, BraDypUS, Cartografia Storica Digitale, CSS, Debian, Droni, E-publishing, Fotogrammetria, GARR Cloud, Gatsby, Gimp, Git, GNSS, GPS, GRASS, GNU / Linux, HTML, Imagemagick, Inkscape, JavaScript, Jekyll, LAP (Laser Aided Profiler), Laser Scanner, Leaflet, MapLibre, Mapserver, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, QGIS, React, SQLite, Stazione Totale, Vector Tiles, Web Server, WebGIS, WebMapping, WebTiles.
Institutional framework and collaborations
LAD is an official stable laboratory of the SARAS Department of Sapienza University of Rome.
Since 2022 LAD has had a scientific research agreement with the GARR Consortium for the provision of institutional services related to the GARR Cloud platform, with data centers located in Italy.