Digitally Recording Excavations on a Budget: A (Low-Cost) DIY Approach from Scotland

Edouard Masson-MacLean; James O'Driscoll; Cathy McIver; Gordon Noble

doi:10.1080/00934690.2021.1970444

Digitally Recording Excavations on a Budget: A (Low-Cost) DIY Approach from Scotland

Edouard Masson-MacLean^* (Corresponding Author), James O'Driscoll, Cathy McIver, Gordon Noble

^*Corresponding author for this work

Archaeology

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

2 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The increasing use of digital technologies can provide significant benefits to the excavation and interpretative process in archaeology. Yet, despite major developments in the last two decades, digital recording can still be seen as part of the realm of tech savvy archaeologists, well-funded projects, or larger commercial units who can develop their own recording systems or deploy a pre-existing application. The latter are often expensive and can be technologically challenging to implement, and few of these focus on both context recording and feature drawing. In response, this paper presents an accessible and flexible low-cost DIY digital workflow developed by the Comparative Kingship Project, Scotland, allowing field practitioners to benefit from some of the key advantages of “going digital” without the associated costs or complexities of some of the other systems

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	595–613
Number of pages	20
Journal	Journal of Field Archaeology
Volume	46
Issue number	8
Early online date	2 Sept 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/00934690.2021.1970444
Publication status	Published - 2 Sept 2021

Bibliographical note

funding: The Leverhulme Trust
Open access via Taylor and Francis Agreement

Edouard Masson-MacLean and James O’Driscoll contributed equally to this paper. We wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their positive comments and constructive suggestions, which improved the original version of the paper. EMM also wishes to thank personally Dr. Joshua Wright (University of Aberdeen) for the informal but valuable and stimulating discussions which helped shape some of the original ideas for this paper. The Comparative Kingship project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of a Research Leadership Award under Grant RL-2016-069. The original impetus for the digital recording was a Historic Environment Scotland grant RG14686 for work at Dunnicaer promontory fort developed by Cathy MacIver—this set the foundations for the workflow outlined above.

Keywords

photogrammetry
drone
fieldwork
database design
methods

Access to Document

10.1080/00934690.2021.1970444Licence: CC BY

MacLean_etal_JFA_Digitally_Recording_Excavations_VoR
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Final published version, 6.87 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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abstract = "The increasing use of digital technologies can provide significant benefits to the excavation and interpretative process in archaeology. Yet, despite major developments in the last two decades, digital recording can still be seen as part of the realm of tech savvy archaeologists, well-funded projects, or larger commercial units who can develop their own recording systems or deploy a pre-existing application. The latter are often expensive and can be technologically challenging to implement, and few of these focus on both context recording and feature drawing. In response, this paper presents an accessible and flexible low-cost DIY digital workflow developed by the Comparative Kingship Project, Scotland, allowing field practitioners to benefit from some of the key advantages of “going digital” without the associated costs or complexities of some of the other systems",

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Digitally Recording Excavations on a Budget: A (Low-Cost) DIY Approach from Scotland

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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