When people like computer scientists think about archaeologists, the first
character that strikes their mind is Indiana Jones, or, if you prefer, the
figure of some old, wise lord with colonial hat on.
Well, reality is quite different: working outside civility is no way easy or
funny. Moreover, the introduction of high technology in hostile environments
(rain, cold, dust, heat etc.) today is still a challenge not simple to win.
From an engineering point of view,
one of the main problems in Field Archaeology today is communication.
If you search for tools or systems that can help archaeologists to locate
new working areas or catalog thousands of objects, you can find a lot;
but if you think of time spent between site excavation and publication of
results (the head and tail of every archaeological research) you may be
surprised to know that a large amount of time is wasted for people in main
digging camp to wait for return of their colleagues bringing finds
from the field.
Let's see an example: we find a good place for excavations and we start to
dig. When we find something interesting, it should be great to have a system
that allows us to communicate our discovery to other scientists at base camp,
giving them a description, a drawing or a snapshot of the find in real time.
Today, such a system doesn't exist, and we are forced to leave the place
where we are working to bring it directly to the camp (or we can give up the
idea of letting them know soon, and store the object for later show).
Well, the aim of RAMSES project is the deployment of that system.
At present we have developed a prototype of it, using a particular network
of small computers with unusual features.
The choice of a machine to be put in the field is obviously conditioned by
the robustness, weight and autonomy of the machine itself.
The only reasonable possibility is use of pen-based
(a keyboard is big and heavy!) palmtop computers with extraordinarily
resistent chassis. In this matter our choice fell on Telxon proposals.
This particular machine has a liquid-crystal display insensible to external
agents where users can write or draw everything they want.
Palmtops present in the field are connected among them (and to a fixed
host-server present at base camp) using a radio-based network.
This configuration allows the archaeologists to communicate in real time
not only with text, but also with drawings, to other field hosts and to
the rest of the scientific community (using the fixed host as a gateway to
Internet !!!).
The software counterpart of this project consists on two subsystems: