About the Archaeological field course at Uppsala University
Sakarias Lindgren is one of the coordinators of the annual excavation course for Archaeology students at Uppsala University. The Hellby site, located on the southeastern outskirts of Uppsala, is an old farmstead that has been in use for over 2000 years, since the Early Iron Age. The university has been excavating the site since 2016.
The importance of accurate documentation in archaeology
Archaeological excavation is inherently a destructive process, meaning that once a site is excavated, it is gone forever. Therefore, it is crucial to record spatial information about archaeological layers, features and artifacts before they are removed from the site. For this purpose, GNSS devices and total stations has been used in archaeology for several decades.
However, measuring the exact position and depth of an object is only part of the task. Equally important is recording the object’s metadata. For example, the fill of a ditch or a posthole* is described by its form, color, texture, soil grain size, its relation to other features and finds, what samples that have been taken from it, and more. Previously, this information was recorded using pen and paper and often stored separately from the GIS data. When Sakarias joined the course in 2022, one of the objectives was to investigate ways to improve the digital documentation methods, preferably using open-source software.
The key aims with introducing the use of Mergin Maps to the course were to collect data structured to meet industry standards, being able to see an overview of items previously excavated, and using different historical maps as background layers for field reference. The ability to use the QGIS form builder allowed them to ensure that data was collected accurately by using drop down lists, field constraints, and ensuring that each item recorded has a unique ID.
Improvements since introducing Mergin Maps to the course
The use of Mergin Maps in the field course turned out to both improve the quality of the data, as well as the experience of the students taking the course. Collecting data in a customizable and structured format improves its usefulness for future studies and research. The possibility to integrate Mergin Maps with high-precision GNSS devices enables information to be recorded up to centimeter-level accuracy, ensuring precise documentation of the context of features and artifacts and how they relate to each other. Additionally, the possibility to explore the data live, along with different background maps, as the site is being excavated, enables analysis and interpretation of the findings already during the field stage itself. This also facilitates easier and quicker sharing of the data with colleagues and other researchers who are working with similar material.
Using Mergin Maps also allowed the students to be more engaged with the digital data that they produce. By accessing the project on their mobile devices, they can even add and edit data even when they are not at the site. Once the field work is completed, Mergin Maps’ close integration with QGIS enables the students to start working on the results of the excavation more quickly than before. This allows them to spend more time analyzing the material, as they previously spent significantly more time processing and entering data during the final two weeks of the course before the introduction of Mergin Maps to the workflow.
Mergin Maps is providing free plans for students and teachers to learn more about field surveying. Learn more about it here.
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*Posthole: A posthole is a dark imprint in the soil of a wooden post and is one of the most common remains we find of Iron Age buildings in Scandinavia.
