Session Abstracts

Gábor Márkus
The problems of documentation of large-scale excavations

The professional documentation of large-scale excavations has posed a special problem for the leaders of such projects for a quarter of a century. A delicate balance must be found between the almost always scarce available time and the quantity and quality of the information to be acquired. In the traditional, mostly paper-based documentation system a number of good solutions have been put into use to solve the problem. During the past years, however, digital technologies have achieved such a breakthrough that applications and procedures previously out of reach have become possible. An incomplete list should include various imaging applications, fast telecommunication networks, the implements of GPS technology (DGPS, RTK), the generation of field implements for geodesic survey, and other computer an data-managing implements that partly integrate the previously mentioned ones. The archaeological adoption of these has opened in many aspects a new phase in the documentation of large-scale excavations. It has become possible for integrated GIS systems to be present in the everyday work during excavation, eliminating the time lag characterizing paper-based documentation. At the same time, their application raises questions that had usually been solved in the paper-based documentation system. As first we should mention the issue of secure data storage, but the distribution of data is just as important.
We invite papers for the session that either present case studies on the possibilities of the methodological integration of such new, primarily digital technologies – preferably already tried and applied during fieldwork – or tackle the theoretical issues of the use of data structures during documentation.

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