Archaeologist Steven Ellis and his team are using iPad with apps like Pages, FMTouch, iDraw, OmniGraffle and Photos to capture invaluable historical data in the trenches at Pompeii. Says Ellis, “That my team could both type and draw on the screen, and also examine all previously entered data, made it an ideal single-device solution”.
In Pompeii the longest continuously excavated archaeological site in the world iPad is revolutionising how scientists work in the field. Rather than recording notes and sketches on paper, researchers at the site use iPad and apps to capture invaluable historical data faster, more easily, and with far better accuracy.
For Dr. Steven Ellis, who directs the University of Cincinnati’s archaeological excavations at Pompeii, perhaps the most significant discovery at the site this year was iPad. Ellis credits the introduction of six iPad devices at Pompeii with helping his team solve one of the most difficult problems of archaeological fieldwork: how to efficiently and accurately record the complex information they encounter in the trenches.
Most archaeological researchers today collect data from their sites as others have for the past 300 years. “It’s all pencil and paper”, says Ellis. “You have to draw things on paper, or in preprinted forms with boxes. That’s a problem because all these pages could be lost on an airplane, they could burn, they could get wet and damaged, or they could be written in unintelligible handwriting. And eventually they have to be digitised or entered into a computer anyway”.
Although portable computers offer a paperless solution, field archaeologists rarely use them in the trenches because their size, input limitations, battery life, and sensitivity to dirt and heat make them impractical in the harsh conditions of a dig.
But Ellis, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, was determined to find a better way to collect data for his current project, which involves excavating below the floor line of an entire neighbourhood near the main thoroughfare of Pompeii. He and a handpicked team of 35 scholars hope to learn from the patterns of reconstruction under the buildings how middle-class Pompeian families actually lived during the 2000 years before a volcanic eruption covered their city in AD 79.
“I’ve been very lucky to get permission to dig up an entire neighbourhood”, says Ellis. “This gives me a real chance of looking not only into a single building but at how a whole community of families developed over time”.
The idea of using iPad to collect the massive data the project would generate came from Ellis’s University of Cincinnati colleague John Wallrodt, an expert on digital databases for archaeological projects. Wallrodt had looked unsuccessfully into using various tablet devices for field research, but when iPad was introduced in January 2010, he knew at once that it was right for their project. Says Wallrodt, “Perfectly portable, with no moving parts, a Multi-Touch screen, and a battery that lasts the whole workday, iPad was practically custom built for our needs”.
Adds Ellis: “It was the ability to enter so many disparate kinds of information, recording everything from architectural elements to fish scales and bones to the actual sequences of events. That my team could both type and draw on the screen, and also examine all previously entered data, made it an ideal single-device solution”.
Forms and Functions
Excavators generally make four kinds of paper records in the field: forms (sometimes a hundred per trench) for describing soil layers and features; notebook entries for recording elevations and space; daily scaled drawings of the trench; and a Harris Matrix, an illustration that shows chronological relationships among layers.
With iPad, Wallrodt was able to re-create each of those functions using “off-the-shelf” apps from the App Store. FMTouch replaced paper forms by allowing researchers to make direct entries into their database forms on iPad. The Pages app supplanted paper notebooks, enabling them to not only enter notations on the iPad keyboard but also import drawings and photos. Scaled drawings were made directly on iPad in iDraw. And OmniGraffle handled the intricate matrix illustrations.
“iPad replaced all of these functions and added many others”, says Wallrodt. “In this way, all of our piles of paper were replaced with a single 0.68 kg device”.
Ellis, who estimates that iPad has already saved him a year of data entry, plans to increase the number of iPad devices from one to two per trench. “The recovery of invaluable information from our Pompeian excavations is now incalculably faster, wonderfully easier, unimaginably more dynamic, precisely more accurate, and robustly secure”, he says.
Beyond the scope of his project, Ellis sees iPad as revolutionising the 300-year-old discipline of archaeological fieldwork. “A generation ago computers made it possible for scholars to move away from just looking at pretty pictures on walls and work with massive amounts of information and data. It was a huge leap forward. Using iPad to conduct our excavations is the next one. And I’m really proud to be a part of it”.
Please click here to view the current range of Apple iPads available at Okobe.co.uk
In Pompeii the longest continuously excavated archaeological site in the world iPad is revolutionising how scientists work in the field. Rather than recording notes and sketches on paper, researchers at the site use iPad and apps to capture invaluable historical data faster, more easily, and with far better accuracy.
For Dr. Steven Ellis, who directs the University of Cincinnati’s archaeological excavations at Pompeii, perhaps the most significant discovery at the site this year was iPad. Ellis credits the introduction of six iPad devices at Pompeii with helping his team solve one of the most difficult problems of archaeological fieldwork: how to efficiently and accurately record the complex information they encounter in the trenches.
Most archaeological researchers today collect data from their sites as others have for the past 300 years. “It’s all pencil and paper”, says Ellis. “You have to draw things on paper, or in preprinted forms with boxes. That’s a problem because all these pages could be lost on an airplane, they could burn, they could get wet and damaged, or they could be written in unintelligible handwriting. And eventually they have to be digitised or entered into a computer anyway”.
Although portable computers offer a paperless solution, field archaeologists rarely use them in the trenches because their size, input limitations, battery life, and sensitivity to dirt and heat make them impractical in the harsh conditions of a dig.
But Ellis, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, was determined to find a better way to collect data for his current project, which involves excavating below the floor line of an entire neighbourhood near the main thoroughfare of Pompeii. He and a handpicked team of 35 scholars hope to learn from the patterns of reconstruction under the buildings how middle-class Pompeian families actually lived during the 2000 years before a volcanic eruption covered their city in AD 79.
“I’ve been very lucky to get permission to dig up an entire neighbourhood”, says Ellis. “This gives me a real chance of looking not only into a single building but at how a whole community of families developed over time”.
The idea of using iPad to collect the massive data the project would generate came from Ellis’s University of Cincinnati colleague John Wallrodt, an expert on digital databases for archaeological projects. Wallrodt had looked unsuccessfully into using various tablet devices for field research, but when iPad was introduced in January 2010, he knew at once that it was right for their project. Says Wallrodt, “Perfectly portable, with no moving parts, a Multi-Touch screen, and a battery that lasts the whole workday, iPad was practically custom built for our needs”.
Adds Ellis: “It was the ability to enter so many disparate kinds of information, recording everything from architectural elements to fish scales and bones to the actual sequences of events. That my team could both type and draw on the screen, and also examine all previously entered data, made it an ideal single-device solution”.
Forms and Functions
Excavators generally make four kinds of paper records in the field: forms (sometimes a hundred per trench) for describing soil layers and features; notebook entries for recording elevations and space; daily scaled drawings of the trench; and a Harris Matrix, an illustration that shows chronological relationships among layers.
With iPad, Wallrodt was able to re-create each of those functions using “off-the-shelf” apps from the App Store. FMTouch replaced paper forms by allowing researchers to make direct entries into their database forms on iPad. The Pages app supplanted paper notebooks, enabling them to not only enter notations on the iPad keyboard but also import drawings and photos. Scaled drawings were made directly on iPad in iDraw. And OmniGraffle handled the intricate matrix illustrations.
“iPad replaced all of these functions and added many others”, says Wallrodt. “In this way, all of our piles of paper were replaced with a single 0.68 kg device”.
Ellis, who estimates that iPad has already saved him a year of data entry, plans to increase the number of iPad devices from one to two per trench. “The recovery of invaluable information from our Pompeian excavations is now incalculably faster, wonderfully easier, unimaginably more dynamic, precisely more accurate, and robustly secure”, he says.
Beyond the scope of his project, Ellis sees iPad as revolutionising the 300-year-old discipline of archaeological fieldwork. “A generation ago computers made it possible for scholars to move away from just looking at pretty pictures on walls and work with massive amounts of information and data. It was a huge leap forward. Using iPad to conduct our excavations is the next one. And I’m really proud to be a part of it”.
Please click here to view the current range of Apple iPads available at Okobe.co.uk
