Applying low budget equipment and open source software for high resolution documentation of archaeological stratigraphy and features

Available technology and measurement methods currently exceed the requirements of archaeological documentation at excavation in terms of precision, accuracy and resolution. Hence, archaeologists face the challenge of deciding not only what and how to document in archaeological terms, but also what degree of precision, accuracy and resolution are necessary and which tools are the most suitable for their purposes. This paper discusses controversial opinions and methods to face this challenge. On one hand, if we are not concerned with price, there is a wide variety of software and hardware technology to meet requirements far beyond archaeological limits. On the other hand, a growing community supports low cost developments in this field, and advances have now reached a point where Open Source (OS) results can compete with those from proprietary devices. As stated above, results and purposes are strongly related to aims and means. Documenting archaeological stratigraphy requires different levels of precision and resolution than documenting architecture, objects or finds. The challenge here is to consider purpose, possibilities, costs and managing accruing amounts of data. This paper aims to act as a kind of guide for archaeologists and historians to find the most suitable documentation equipment out of a wide range of possibilities