The Cyber-Unit

[kevin wooldridge]

Field-staff can start the post-ex in the field, rather than leave it to someone else to sort out in post-ex; i would in fact suggest that digital recording has when used democratically the potential to be one of the most empowering tools for field staff. I wish more were done on my sites like that. But it is too expensive for small units. I am a bit cheesed off right now cross referencing my Access database and then copying data and dumping it into excel and then into the word doc. This probably also says more about skill-set with Access and so forth than i would usually admit to...xx(

I think Gwyl that digital recording systems might be cheaper than you think and perhaps you should at least get a quote from a company like Intrasis. You might be surprised...

.....the point you make about the staff being more involved in the field is correct. The amount of time (and therefore money) that might can be saved in avoiding repetitive mundane time consuming tasks at the post-ex stage is another important point and one where efficiences can be made that will pay-back the cost of the initial investment.

I personally think that one of the main hinderances in UK archaeology to the furtherance of digital archaeology, is the way that in most projects, costs are divided up between excavation and post-excavation tasks. If you wanted to make the field work slightly more expensive to justify making the post-ex massively cheaper, you would probably lose contracts at the intial tendering point and never get the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of a fully digital system. Hence the reason that Intrasis for example is very popular in countries or organisations where field and post-ex funding is integrated and tendering is not an issue.