ABSTRACT
The 1990s witnessed the progressive ‘miniaturization’ of personal computers and other digital devices. This affected virtually every type of business, research program, as well as the daily lives of millions of people around the world with access to electricity. The development of portable highspeed personal computers and other data collecting devices was not lost on archaeologists who have always had a deep interest in utilizing technological and scientific methods to advance their recording and study of the past (Renfrew and Bahn 2004). In 1997, when the University of California, San Diego initiated the deep-time study of ancient metallurgy and social evolution in Jabal Hamrat Fidan (JHF) region of the Faynan district in southern Jordan, a fairly traditional style of ‘analogue’ or paper archaeological recording was carried out during the first season of excavation. With the exception of using a very expensive Sony video camera for taking digital still photographs of artifacts to upload images to the project web site, in 1997 field recording was based on the use of traditional ‘dumpy’ levels and measuring tapes to triangulate the location of finds, light-boxes for tracing daily excavation graphic diary plans each evening, film based photography, and the recording of archaeological context data (loci) on a range of different descriptive paper forms stored in ring-binders. This system was adequate for 1997 because the fieldwork focused solely on the re-excavation of an Early Bronze age village site (Adams and Genz 1995; Levy, Adams, and Najjar 1999) and an Iron Age cemetery (Levy, Adams, and Shafiq 1999).
