Content:
This paper addresses the need for an efficient unified platform for linking databases and practical protocols for digitising archaeological features through a series of limited-use concept episodes (LUCEs, pronounced “luckies”). LUCEs describe from start to finish the process of digitising features commonly encountered by field archaeologists under time and budget constraints. ‘Limited’ and ‘episodic’ are used deliberately to signify all-in-one guideline packets that are digestible (i.e., not needlessly complicated) and convertible (i.e., relatable to the most common scenarios encountered in cultural resource management). Legacy data from a desktop survey of early Aegean fortifications conducted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic will serve as the first of these LUCEs. The grand intent behind this and similar initiatives is to offer viable solutions to protect, record, store, and disseminate rapidly diminishing and at-risk cultural heritage, namely built-stone, rock-cut, and earthen architecture that cannot be sustainably studied without digital methods. On a practical level, LUCEs—or any guide, manual, or other instruction kit for field archaeologists for that matter—need not be exhaustive or perfect. They must, however, be durable and viable. In other words, we must detail affordable, readily available, teachable solutions that can be deployed with technology and training that is already in use within the majority of training spaces for cultural heritage managers: academic, professional, and avocational. Citizen science is a powerful tool while we await advances in artificial intelligence, and the much sought after push for FAIR and Open Science data has never been more crucial for sustainable cultural heritage management in a rapidly changing world.
Keywords:
FAIR data, Open Science, Fortifications, Digital Archaeology, Cultural Heritage Management, Photogrammetry