University of Southampton OCS (beta), CAA 2012

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Recording on Commercial Excavations with the Nikon Archaeology iSpace System.
Maarten Smeets, Geoff Avern

Last modified: 2011-12-20

Abstract


The second author has recently worked with the Nikon Metrology company on applying their metrology tracking system to the drawing of archaeological excavations (Avern, in press) which resulted in the release of an archaeology-specific version of the system at CAA-2010 Beijing.

The first author (MS) is director of the company Studiebureau Archeologie, Belgium. This company was the first to use the archaeology iSpace system in attempting to realise its potential to substantially reduce the total excavation time of a commercial project in a housing development site within the remains of a 13th Century Beguinage in Tienen (Belgium, prov. Vlaams-Brabant). This estimated 50 day project was completed within 30 days.

The authors will briefly describe the operation of the Archaeology iSpace system. We will then discuss various aspects of system gleaned from its use on more than 10 commercial excavations, such as the speed of data acquisition in the field, how the data is subsequently handled, savings in post-processing time and our views on the potential impact of the system for urban and commercial archaeology.


Keywords


recording; excavations