Recording: Introduction

The team has experienced tremendous growth over the past 15 years, in terms of the scale of the ongoing work, the interdisciplinary nature of the undertaking and the staff involved. As a result, a huge mass of data is being generated, which needs careful management, as the data are not only results in themselves, but may also generate many new research questions. As a team, we have a growing concern of safeguarding our results for future generations of researchers.

Therefore, we are very pleased that after two seasons of preliminary testing and many brainstorming sessions in Leuven, SIIS, or the Sagalassos Integrated Information System, is now being tested and applied to the ongoing research activities, in its first comprehensive version. SIIS is a result of the collaboration between KERN International and the Sagalassos project. SIIS is a new way of gathering our evidence in the field; for example, by applying the locus system, which targets more individualized places rather than layers, during our excavations. Although SIIS creates more administration work in the field, it is already clear that the new framework has many benefits, including integrating architectural and stratigraphical data. At the same time, data from new finds is fed back into SIIS, allowing fieldworkers to access information on the chronology or functionality of their excavated or surveyed structures. SIIS was also conceived as an open system, allowing any results obtained during the post-excavation stages, such as analysis of geomorphological samples, to be fed back into the database. In this way, a general information system has been created which will allow this and future generations of scholars to concentrate more on the quality of their observations, strengthening their conclusions and, most importantly, providing a better reconstruction of daily life in the past at Sagalassos and its environs.