Our team, the archaeological section of the Medieval Art, History, Paleography and Archaeology research group (MAHPA) and part of the Laboratory of Medieval Archaeology of the University of Barcelona (LAM-UB), has been working on the field in the Tremp-Montsec area (an important part of the Orígens UNESCO Global Geopark in Lleida, Catalonia) for more than 25 years now (Alegría et al., 2019). Since some years ago, other sites from around Catalonia have been added, and we now have three undergoing intervention projects that include 13 archaeological sites with chronologies that range from the 7th to the 17th century, most of them located in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees.
Since the early 2000 this team has been eager to implement and use emerging technologies. Our main motivations have been ameliorating data analysis and interpretation, fostering dissemination and public engagement, but also overcoming the challenges that our work implies: mountain sites that are difficult to access, lack of time and, especially, short funding. With these goals in mind, we have been using for some years 3D reconstruction tools, GIS, databases and 3D digital recording methods. These new techniques and methods, applied both to our field and laboratory work, have profoundly changed our workflow. The use of new tools to process and work with those data are also fostering the interpretation exercise and helping build archaeological and historical knowledge (Costa & Sancho, in press). However, their implementation by fits and starts, the lack of funding to provide proper training to our team (or to have a specialist on the matter), and the dramatic growth our site set has undergone in the last few years (from 2 active sites in 2014 to 11 excavation and 4 survey sites in 2022) left in result a slightly chaotic, Frankenstein-like flow that combines both digital and analogic processes, with a lack of standard procedures (differences in the recording and processing methodology amongst the different sites), high risk of miscommunication, and redundant data.
The field data is currently recorded mostly on paper (stratigraphic context information) or by digital means or tools (topographic data, graphic data). For some specific excavations, a database (running on a tablet) is updated on-site. The finds and artifacts are later studied in the Medieval Archaeology Laboratory (LAM-UB) and the data collected from their analysis is normally registered in internal simple databases or Excel files. In 2018, a new recording methodology was introduced to all site excavations within the project. Since then, all stratigraphic contexts are being recorded with georeferenced photogrammetry, creating 3D models that are the core of the documentation of those contexts that are now already destroyed. This new methodology is giving great results in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and is now opening a great deal of possibilities, even though it is now mostly used to produce 2D recording traditional results, such as archaeological planimetries and sections (Batlle et al., 2022). However, it also highlights the need to better document the digital data (which is more easily decontextualized) and to link it with all the related archaeological, landscape and historical data.
The new technologies implemented have been game-changing for our team, and the workflow described is giving us good results, as it allows us to work in a more efficient way and to record more and better data. However, we are aware it is not perfect: sometimes the data are not centralized nor interconnected, and, as they are processed, stored and managed by the site directors only, they end up in silos of information corresponding to each site. This hinders data integration and makes it difficult to analyze and understand the data in their completeness, which could prevent the main project goals from being properly reached. Currently, there are multiple and heterogenous datasets created and managed within the project (which include field data from different sites, 3D models, artifacts’ data, etc.) scattered across multiple locations, with or without proper backups and lacking an updated tracking or recording system. We are now facing a new problem: the management and preservation of a big (and growing) amount of data.
We know positively that digital tools, techniques, and methods, although they may have been one of the causes of our current problems, are also the answer. However, it is clearer than ever that with great power comes great responsibility; an inappropriate implementation or a misunderstanding of their potential can do more harm than good, and the need to train ourselves to be able to adapt to the current challenges, and those yet to come, is becoming a crucial matter.
In our presentation, we will describe and map our current workflow(s) exploring how this slow implementation of the emerging digital technologies has been shaping it during the past decade and reassessing it. We will also evaluate all the positive and negative aspects that the digitization of the archaeological recording methods have brought us, pondering over the experience accumulated during these years, trying to extract valuable lessons from our (both good and bad) experiences, and drawing some future improvement lines –either on paper or on digital tools.