Zagora goes digital

by Irma Havlicek, Powerhouse Museum Online Producer
with Andrew Wilson, Archaeologist and Database Specialist
representing Arts eResearch at the University of Sydney

Until quite recently, information from the field for archaeological research was largely gathered by pen and paper. That’s how it would have been done during the first Australian excavations at Zagora in the 1960s and 70s.

Developments in technology are enabling huge advances in how we can record – and later easily filter and aggregate – information, and the Zagora team are taking advantage of the benefits of such technologies.

A new system is being developed by Arts eResearch at the University of Sydney to enable digital recording on the spot of all relevant information for each grid.

Andrew Wilson from Arts eResearch and Beatrice McLoughlin from the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (who is Finds Manager on the Zagora project) are providing feedback daily to Arts eResearch to customise the system. This is part of an Australia-wide project called FAIMS (Federated Archaeological Information System), led by Dr Shawn Ross at the University of New South Wales.

Each working morning since the system was first used on Thursday 25 October 2012, one of the project team leaders on site assigns everyone into teams for particular grid areas. The teams are made up of two or three people depending on how many we have on site on a particular day (if more people, we have the luxury of three people to a team; if fewer people, some teams have only two members). There is an allocated team leader who is an experienced archaeologist, and then one or two others who may be trained archaeologists or archaeology students/volunteers.

The team leader is given a digital tablet which has been equipped with the newly developed software on which the following kinds of information is entered:

– Location of the grid by letter and number, eg, H0040, meaning the grid numbered 0040 in the H 100 metre square grid (the tablets also record the location with inbuilt geo-location capability). More about the grid system here.
– Date and time.
– Visibility to the soil surface where artefacts may be found. When calculating visibility for a grid, areas which can not have had geophysical analysis, for example, the large spiky holme bush areas and the large rock piles, are excluded from the calculation.
– Soil cover / vegetation.
– Points of interest (known as POIs) These include any indications of human activity such as building structures including rock walls whether standing or collapsed; any significant object apart from the usual kinds of pottery sherds that have been found in the location, for example, any pieces of slag, or any stone piles.

Here is a screenshot of one of the tablet views, to give you an idea of the interface and the kinds of information provided with each record:

Stone piles will generally require further research to determine whether they are the results of a settlement house collapse (over time, usually the roof falls in first, then the walls fall in), or are the remains of ancient walls or more recent walls – for example built by farmers using the site in more recent times.

The information is geo-located within about 30 seconds (accurate to within about four metres), and photographs are also taken with the tablets and incorporated into the record for the site.

Up to 15 teams can work the site grids at any time as there are 15 tablets available for use.

At the end of each day, the information from the tablets is uploaded into the University of Sydney Heurist database for further analysis.

Once information from all the grids is entered into the central database, a fuller, richer picture of the site will emerge. The project team leaders will then assess this information, in combination with the results of the geophysical survey, to determine where to dig test trenches in the coming weeks.

The only records we have now of written communication from the time of the Zagora settlement are the decorations left on pottery. These remain for us to ponder and try to understand now, almost three thousand years later. And now we are recording our findings about Zagora digitally. I wonder, will our digital recordings remain for others to ponder in another three thousand years?