Educating the Digital Fieldwork Assistant

This paper describes ongoing development of the FieldNote system at the Dept of Computer Science, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK (Ryan et al., 1998, 1999a, 1999b). A new version of this portable system for self-location, mapping, and note-taking during archaeological fieldwork, was field tested in October 2000 during a systematic survey by teams from the archaeological departments of Groningen University and the Free University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) in the Sibaritide region (Calabria, Italy). In these tests, the system was used for wide-area mapping tasks for the first time, and proved to be very useful in mapping field boundaries, highland transhumance routes, and archaeological sites to a specified accuracy and in the absence of detailed up-to-date topographic maps. It also proved useful in navigation and in re-locating archaeological sites mapped in the 1960's. The results of the SIBA2000 field tests will be presented here, and the significance of these for future survey design and methodology discussed with an emphasis on the trade-off between speed of operation and accuracy. Lines for further development of the system, including improvements to both interface and functionality are set out as well.