An exciting update at the CAA conference was the Federated Archaeological Information Management Systems Project (FAIMS) and in particular, their field recording system for mobile devices. FAIMS is a federally funded project led by the University of New South Wales in conjunction with 41 other organisations around Australia and worldwide, which aims to “create a digital infrastructure for archaeology“.

FAIMS has done an extensive study of what’s already available, both in terms of mobile apps for field recording, as well as running GIS on android devices, and has seen what works and what doesn’t. The project will have a working mobile app for android, specifically tailored for Australian archaeology, but flexible enough to be used for almost any related purpose, available before the end of the year. Prototypes are already available.

What they showed us at the conference looks amazing – a fully customisable interface with, in addition to standard data entry (including GPS capture, photos etc from internal or external devices), options for setting how sure one is of a designation, and mini “dictionaries” of e.g. different ceramic styles/types so that field operatives can pick the closest and in effect say “it looks kind of like this” where “kind of” is optionally specifiable as well. FAIMS is committed to integrating GIS on-the-fly and making sure the whole thing works off-line (which is where most fieldwork takes place, at least in Aus).

As well as an American archaeological database system called TDAR, FAIMS is now also working closely with Heurist. Heurist is a brilliant archaeological database, integrating both time and space in new and novel ways, perfect for archaeologists, and allowing one to structure one’s data in a very effective way. The FAIMS/Heurist combo looks to be very powerful for archaeologists and should put us at the leading edge of archaeological information systems worldwide.

Watch this space for news of further developments!