Digital Excavation Documentation – Objective and Sustainable (A Workshop Summary)

Reiner GÖLDNER¹ | David BIBBY²
(¹Saxon Archaeological Heritage Office, Dresden | ²State Heritage Management Baden-Württemberg, Germany)

Keywords: digital excavation documentation, digital archiving

Abstract:
On archaeological excavations context information cannot be preserved in its original state. So it is important to build an objective and sustainable documentation which will provide all information gathered for future scientific visualisation. Some interesting aspects arise from combining the questions: Which digital methods best produce objective record of excavation facts and which of them produce sustainable information ready to be preserved over hundreds of years.
Within this subject area the workshop covered questions such as: Which digital methods are used for excavation documentation? Is there a trend from CAD to GIS? How useful are 3D scans? How might we achieve data sustainability? How can usability be preserved over hundreds of years? Which open standards are useful?
Today’s practice often shows that digital methods are considered independent of preservation aspects. This workshop was a step toward changing this and setting up synergy effects combining both themes. It offered the possibility of exchanging hands-on experiences between archaeologists on the one hand and discussing prospects and starting points to future FOSS projects on the other hand.
The presentation will give a short summary of the workshop „Digitale Grabungsdokumentation – objektiv und nachhaltig“, which was held in February 2018 in Dresden. The Workshop was organized by the commission Archaeology and Information Systems of the Association of State Archaeologists in Germany due to increasing interest in sharing experiences on this topic. About one hundred archaeologists and excavation technicians from Germany and Switzerland came together, shared their experience, presented their ideas and discussed the above mentioned aspects.

Relevance for the conference: The presentation is about objective and sustainable digitisation as precondition for scientific visualisation.
Relevance for the session: Rescue archaeology is the central use case of all discussed digitisation and archiving aspects.
Innovation: The aim is to set up synergy effects combining questions of digitisation and archiving.
References:
• http://www.landesarchaeologen.de/verband/kommissionen/archaeologie-und-informationssysteme/projektearbeitsgruppen/workshop-digitale-grabungsdokumentation/