David K. Pettegrew

Taking Mobile Computing to the Field

As our plane began its descent to Larnaka, Cyprus, the familiar request came from the cockpit to put away all electronic devices. I turned my head and peered down the aisle of the plane to see nine undergraduate students shutting down the iPads loaned to them for their month-long archaeological sojourn to the island. I closed the cover to my own tablet but not before touching the “submit” button in the archaeology app that we would be using in the field later that week. The PylaKoutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) was going paperless for its 2012 season of excavation at the Hellenistic site of Pyla-Vigla, and we were still working out the bugs in an experimental mobile application customized for data acquisition. Our decision to bring iPads to Cyprus marked an opportune moment. Samuel Fee was teaching a class on mobile applications at Washington and Jefferson College and looking for some real test-bed cases, while David Pettegrew was taking students to Cyprus for a month of fieldwork, bringing with him thirteen iPads loaned by Messiah College for pedagogical trials. Teaming up to develop an experimental mobile application for fieldwork, we dedicated an iPad to each student for completing course assignments and reserved four devices for each of the excavation units under investigation. Like other archaeologists adopting mobile technology for field work in the last several years, our paperless field season marked an experimental trial that greatly affected our experience of the archaeological process.