FootPrint is a new tool that helps you manage your excavation site. It ensures that you can always identify a particular sample, so that things don't get lost in the field.
A team of up to 200 archaeological fieldworkers can record “find” data on their Android mobile devices and the data will be automatically updated to a central laptop through wifi.
We know archaeology is a bit like putting a puzzle together that has lots of pieces missing. You come out of the field with thousands of bits and pieces and then you have to figure out what they all mean. The excavation is one of the most important methods in archaeology and most people think it is easy. But in fact, great care has to be taken to make sure that all the material you find is properly recorded. The bagging and labelling bags must be done correctly as that can be the difference between a good and a poor final picture. For that reason, a methodological approach to collecting all of the finds from an excavation is the “bread and butter” of good archaeological fieldwork. We all know that to be the case, yet to date the standard method of recording finds involves manually labelling bags and compiling site inventories. A modern excavation of only modest size could produce 1000 or more bags of material a day. The potential for errors to creep in is frightening.
What would happen if at the end of your work day all your finds (bags) were stored on a central database and labelled with computer and human-readable labels produced on the fly. Wouldn’t it be great if you left the field each day with a full inventory of all your bags of finds in an Excel spreadsheet? Imagine a case where you would not have to manually label bags, check them all at the end of the work day and then create an inventory. Imagine eliminating 90% of the potential for errors.
The system we have developed allows up to 200 fieldworkers to record “find” data on their Android mobile devices and to have that data automatically upload to a central server (i.e. a laptop on site) through wifi. At any time a computer and human-readable label can be printed for those bags. Even if a fieldworker left the wifi zone and kept recording finds, once they came back into range their finds would be automatically updated to the on site server and assigned a unique identification code. Would that make your day easier?
FOOTPRINT can do just that.
FootPrint is still in early development stages and we want to improve it. So we would be very appreciative to you if you could find the time to try our demo access version with your team and give us an idea of how it can be made more serviceable to your profession.
If you have not yet received a trial code contact us and we will email you one. Please check your email spam folder because some systems have been known to place the trial code emails there. When you first launch FootPrint you will be required to enter your trial code. We walk you through this, and its general usage, in the tutorial video.
Please take some time to investigate the features that FootPrint has to offer by either right clicking on the video and saving it to your PC or watching it from this site.
The tutorial video will guide you through the process of using FootPrint and teach you to configure the server.
