Archaeological notebooks are sloppy. They just are. Take elevations, for instance. You need to use the level or total station when it is ready not when you are ready. This makes for some creative record keeping to store the elevations: the corner of your SU sheet, inside cover of your notebook, your hand, whatever is nearby. The data will often get transferred to its proper place later. This happens with a surprising amount of archaeological data. Ideas can creep up on you at any time: while walking home, just before you fall asleep, while having dinner with your trenchmates. These thoughts can get recorded in a bunch of odd places and sometimes they lie forgotten there, with no place to call home.

Most of the trench supervisors that I know compensate for this by spending a large amount of outside-the-trench-time working on their notebooks and forms. They have to gather these pieces of odd information and put them into the database, a drawing, or in a place in their notebook where they will have a context and can be useful for someone else later on.

But where to store these odd snippets until then? My best suggestion is to use a task manager on the iPads. There are hundreds of them to choose from. I am an early adopter of Things and I like some aspects of the program but lately I have been trying to get people to adopt some of the free software: Sorted, Wunderlist, or even Epic Win. You don’t have to use all of the features of any of these programs, but simply using it as a list of action items that can be checked off when completed can save an enormous amount of time when you have some time to focus and get some things done.

I have a hard time getting people to adopt to-do lists. I use them extensively, as does Steven Ellis, our director. But the trench supervisors are hesitant. I attribute this to the graduate student lifestyle. Grad students are notoriously bad at time management and almost all trench supervisors on excavations are grad students. So, in addition to any other changes we make to this year’s workflow, I am going to push for the adoption of any task manager for everyone on the project. I hope to wipe the task manager from the list of most unused features.

One of the first things we realized in 2010 at Pompeii was that while the iPads were working for our data recording, too many people wanted to use them at the same time. One person needed to record some elevations at the same time someone wanted to write down a description of the soil of the fill. Our immediate answer to that was: put two in each trench. It wasn’t until this spring that I began to wonder just how that would work. Even if I had a full network going at the site, which I don’t, I couldn’t keep the two iPads totally in sync with their various documents. So you couldn’t pick up iPad 53000-1 (I named them after their trench) for twenty minutes, add some data, put it down, and then pick up 53000-2 and expect to pick up where you left off. And if you couldn’t do that, how do you separate the duties that the iPads need to perform?

While speaking to the trench supervisors this spring about it, we seem to have come to the conclusion that we can separate the software and duties that each iPad will handle.

iPad 1 will usually be at the trench supervisor’s side. That will be the primary tablet for the notebook and matrix information. iPad 2 will be the database and drawing tablet. My concern is that the drawing and data recording will need to be done at the same time but I have been assured that this isn’t the case.

The two iPads will have access to the other’s data, but it will be up to four hours old. I can copy the database and the drawings from the first iPad to the second and copy the documents from the second iPad to the first, but the team members need to know what is editable on each iPad.

We will see how that works soon.