Over the past two years I have developed a project template for archaeological pedestrian reconnaissance. This was inspired by proprietary software we used in privatized compliance archaeology (in the US, cultural resources management, or CRM). Now I am professor at a small college in west Texas and wishing to train students for futures in compliance work, as well as doing some of our own compliance initiatives through the Center for Big Bend Studies. This drove me to seek an open-source alternative to the proprietary software and other alternatives with paywalls.
QField wound up being the perfect platform for this. Because of the complexity of human behavior, archaeologists need to record a broad range of data, including point, line, and polygon records, as well as filling out site forms. It may be necessary, for instance, to record a road, two structures, a prospecting pit, a cliff, two large juniper trees, shovel test pits, artifacts of numerous types, datums, overview photos, and more all within a site boundary, along with numerous isolated artifacts across the project area. Site forms require large text fields for narratives, component and setting descriptions, etc. It will likely also be the case that multiple mapping devices are in use on a single project. For this reason, my project template records a field number (fn) unique to each record and device. If geometries fall within or intersect a site boundary, they are given the association of the site fn. Photos can be captured in the geometry layers, and artifact tallies within site forms.
The project template is finally up on Github (we have successfully deployed versions of it), and I am eager to get some feedback, and finally turn it free for others to use, individually, for academic or private work, and anything in between.
