Borden system
The Borden System , or Système Borden or Borden System , is a process with which archaeological sites in Canada can be clearly identified and located at the same time. It is a basic hand tool for every student of archeology . The system is named after its creator Charles Edward Borden , who developed it together with Wilson Duff in 1952 at the University of British Columbia .
The Borden system is based on a division of the whole of Canada into a grid that is based on latitude and longitude . It consists of four letters and at least one number for each archaeological site.
The first character is an uppercase letter that designates one of the areas that span two degrees of latitude. They are denoted by consecutive letters from south to north, ranging from A to U. The second character is a lowercase letter that refines this system. They range from a to l and last 10 minutes each , also from south to north.
A similar procedure is used from east to west with the third character, again a capital letter (A to W), each of which includes four degrees of longitude. Again follows a lower case letter, each of which represents 10 minutes from east to west.
However, this grid is wider-meshed north of the 62nd parallel, there it comprises 8 instead of 4 longitudes, or 20 minutes each. This is a pragmatic convention of the fact that the squares from south to north get smaller the closer you get to the North Pole .
The name in the Borden system for the Charlie Lake Cave is, for example, HbRf 39 . The letters are used for localization in the aforementioned grid, the number denotes the 39th location in the so-called area. The 39 refers to the chronological order of discovery.
The system is also suitable for determining a single artifact . The name of the place of discovery is called, in this case HbRf 39 , and the number of the object is appended after a colon without a space.
In the United States , the Smithsonian trinomial system developed by the Smithsonian Institution in the 1930s is used for the same purpose .
Web links
- General Upper Borden Grid Maps (PDFs)
- Parks Canada Archaeological Recording Manual: Excavations and Surveys. Provenience System , Parks Canada
Remarks
- ^ Charles E. Borden, Wilson Duff: A Uniform Site Designation Scheme for Canada , in: Anthropology in British Columbia 3 (1952) 44-48.