Advantages and disadvantages of digital approach in archaeological fieldwork

Graphics and photographs have always played a fundamental role in archaeological documentation and data interpretation. Both may be affected by subjective interpretation. In the last decades the digital approach has helped to speed up fieldwork and provide enough information for GIS platforms. Since the 1990ies researches have applied digital numeric models to the representation of phenomena also in disciplines like archaeology. Nowadays this approach has become common practice. Nevertheless exploiting increasing amounts of data often implies more complex procedures for investigation and categorization. The whole process depends on the quality of models adopted to gather, order out and process this information. It is aided by 3D numeric models that are becoming widely available for automatic 3D acquisition, digitalization and real time browsing. Digital gathering of fieldwork should consider the need of collecting maximum information in the shortest time and budgetary constraints.