Survey and GIS Manual

I announce the release of the Survey and GIS manual produced at Oxford Archaeology North during the last few months after development of new on-site survey and GIS methodologies applicable to any archaeological project.


This document is intended to supply an easy-to-understand but comprehensive guide to survey and open source GIS, from setting up survey equipment to downloading and processing survey data. The manual is intended for speeding-up, or annihilating the training procedure and providing a guide to survey to field staff in case no professional surveyor is on site. An inexperienced member of field staff should, by following this manual step-by-step, be able to set up a Total Station, conduct survey and download and process the survey data, given a certain amount of time.



Procedures are explained in great detail with screenshots and photographs where appropriate and guides to troubleshooting and examples for data maintenance are provided. The manual is written in such manner that it can easily be adjusted for individual sites' survey requirements. Chapters can be extracted easily and supplied individually.

Versions exist for use on site with a robotic Leica TCR1205 Total Station together with a remote control unit as well as without remote control.

The downloading software used in this manual is Leice GeoOffice (can be replaced by whatever software comes with the Total Station used) and GIS software is the gvSIG OA Digital Edition. I furthermore recommend Inkscape as a vector editing software for touching up maps produced by gvSIG.

This document is available for download as PDF on http://www.openarchaeology.net/ or through the link above.

I would be extremely grateful for feedback!