Hugh Corley added these thoughts.

English Heritage acquired and adapted the Intrasis system for our excavations after long consideration of the available systems. I think it would be far too easy to be disturbed by the time we spent evaluating our needs and adapting Intrasis to meet them, concluding that the process was too costly and too time-consuming. However, I would strongly disagree. Key to our adoption of Intrasis was a fundamental shift in data recording, a shift from the paper as the primary record to a primary digital record held in Intrasis. Now 4 years after adopting Intrasis we are still struggling with this change.

While our database design is not perfect — not least because we bought a product that needed adaptation instead of designing a system ourselves, it does capture the information in most cases the way we want it. In addition, it can be altered to address specific research questions. Data entry, on the other hand, continues to be a real challenge.

Fundamental to the challenges of producing high quality digital data from excavations is allocating the necessary resources. Our belief is that, if the digital record is the primary record, it must be entered by the excavator, not passed on to another party. This has two advantages. First, the data should reflect the excavators’ interpretations more accurately. Second, we believe that the process encourages greater ownership of the digital data by the excavators.

Taking excavators from the field to enter their own records takes them out of the trench. This problem is exaggerated when an excavator is called back out of the trench by a supervisor to correct a record as well. Not included in the foregoing is the additional time the supervisor must spend checking these records.

I would argue that the advantages of leaving the field (the only sure place where errors in the record can be corrected) with a complete and checked record far outweigh the costs of the resources required to accomplish this result, especially for accelerating all of the work that must follow. Archaeological fieldwork, in my experience, is a very myopic experience. It can be difficult to appreciate the sacrifices that you must make to produce high quality data, but I believe that this process creates benefits worth the costs.

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