Abstract Several archaeological studies have recently been conducted in the region of Tours (Val-de-Loire, France) on village cemeteries. They consist in assessments carried out through small excavations, mechanical test pits and construction monitoring. The field projects are associated with a study of archives (written and cartographic sources) and a documentary study (old excavations and discoveries, documents, local knowledge)
The usual documentary study aims at guiding the implementation of the excavation. The latter then provides most of the information. In certain cases, such as ours, the old documentation allows to understand the remains which result from limited observations.
The spatial study of these sites occupied in the long term requires the management of the archaeological documentation in a database or directly through the GIS software. This is also the case of the information given by archives and documentary studies that needs to be structured beforehand.
Nevertheless the structuring of the data is not an obvious fact. It only proves useful when georeferencing the information. The old documentary or archive studies performed without SIG locate the information in the form of a map while the current studies tend to spatial analysis.
This new approach requires the establishment of a catalog of datas aimed at their ranking according to their attributes, intended for analyse. The preliminary definition of attribute information is based on questions derived from a problem that must be mastered beforehand.
Village funeral groups of the diocese of Tours are particularly well documented by the textual and archaeological sources and have been sufficiently studied for the last twenty years to introduce changes in the structuring of the data from archives and documentary studies toward the systematic use of GIS, particularly in preventive archeology.
