Claire Reeler

PERSON Claire Reeler
Claire Reeler
Occupation:	Archaeologist
Title:	Doctor of Philosophy
Professional Membership:	{{{member}}}
Known For:	GIS, Heurist
Discipline:	Archaeology
Sub Discipline:	Spatial Analysis, GIS in Archaeology, Information visualization, Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry, Humanities
Workplaces:	, , ,
Notable Ideas:	, ,
Education:	University of Sydney, University of Cape Town
Doctoral Advisor:	Prof. Alison Betts, Prof. Daniel T. Potts
Influences:	Lewis Binford, John Yellen, John Parkington,
Email:	{{{email}}}
ORCID:	{{{orcid}}}
Claire Reeler 's Network Links

Claire Reeler is an archaeologist who specialises in spatial archaeology and lithics. She has worked as an archaeologist in South Africa, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Australia. She has been doing Spatial Analysis in archaeology using GIS since 1990. In the mid 1990s she played around with Fuzzy logic and using an Artificial neural network for data mining with GIS.

In 2006 Claire went to Saudi Arabia, where she was blown away by the beauty of the desert and the amazing archaeology. She started working with the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, at first editing the English version of Vol. 20 of Atlal, the journal of Saudi Arabian archaeology. She was also part of the Saudi team in the joint Saudi-UK Southern Red Sea Project with the University of York. After Saudi, she went to Bahrain, where she worked with the team for the Nomination of the World Heritage Site Pearling, Testimony of an Island Economy. She then went on to develop a National Sites Database for Bahrain, using Heurist.

Early Life and Education

Claire grew up in South Africa and decided that she wanted to be an archaeologist at the age of 7. She started hanging around at the local museum and went on her first fieldtrip at the age of 15 with local museum archaeologists and students from University of Cape Town. After finishing school, she enrolled for a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Archaeology and African History. For her Honours degree she analysed the lithics from the Later Stone Age site of Dunefield Midden on the Cape west coast and then went on to using a Geographic information system for intra-site spatial analysis within Dunefield Midden.

Her Doctor of Philosophy focussed on changing settlement patterns through time on the island of Bahrain, as approached from a study of the lithics. The Heurist database developed for the National Sites Database of Bahrain was a crucial part of her analysis and was built into a comprehensive database of most of the sites recorded in Bahrain since the 1970s.

Career

GIS in the 1990s

Example map of lithics distribution at Dunefield Midden, using Arc/Info in 1992

The Archaeology Department at University of Cape Town was relatively early to take up GIS, thanks to collaboration with the Geography and Surveying departments. An early version of Arc/Info was run on a number of hefty computers (for the day), including Sun workstations. We were interested in looking at the spatial patterning at an intra-site level at the LSA site of Dunefield Midden. The site of Dunefield Midden was a Late Stone Age site, excavated as part of a research project led by Prof. John Parkington. The clustering of lithics in particular parts of the site lent itself to this approach and facilitated the mapping and interpretation of the site, as well as providing data which could be used for statistical analysis.

Using GIS led Claire to an interest in databases and the improved analysis possible with a "real" database, especially one with associated spatial data, as opposed to a spreadsheet. Claire ended up doing some work for the GIS centre at the University of Cape Town, including coordinating the South-Western Cape section of a Protea Atlas of South Africa.

During the 1990s GIS was gaining traction within the discipline of Archaeology internationally. There were many discussions about the role of GIS and how it was best used. Many discussions centred on using GIS "because we can" or because something seemed cool, rather than aimed at answering research questions. At the same time, there were lots of excellent examples of the advantages which GIS brought to archaeological analysis.

In the mid-90s Claire spent some time at the University of Auckland, where she built up a relational database using a Paradox database of Maori pa sites, complemented by using ArcGIS to map sites across the landscape, as well as mapping individual sites with a total station.

Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf

In 2006 Claire went, with her family, to live in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where she discovered an almost untapped wealth of archaeology, covering the entire sweep of human existence. She was fortunate enough to join the (then) Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, now the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, assisting with English translations from Arabic (and occasionally French) and, in 2009, joining the joint Saudi-British research project at the Farasan Islands in the Red Sea, as a member of the Saudi team! Claire's presence in the team, led by Prof. Geoff Bailey and Dr Abdullah Alsharekh, excavating sites and conducting surveys in the Farasan Islands, paved the way for other female archaeologists, including marine archaeologists to join the team. Claire also conducted a summer course for female archaeology students at the women's campus of King Saud University in Riyadh, under the guidance and encouragement of Dr Abdullah Alsharekh, Associate Professor of Prehistoric Archaelogy at the Department of Archaeology.

In 2010

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