IOSA.it Open Archaeology

As many readers will know, since 2008 we’ve been working to enable archaeologists and their colleagues with a chance to do professional surveying on free operating systems. What sounded like a silly idea is now reality in the Total Open Station project.

Total stations do a nice job, but that’s you do something more when you’re interested in what’s beneath the soil rather than on top of it. Enter geophysics, with another load of costly hardware tools that are locked in proprietary combinations of software and drivers.

In case you’re using GNU/Linux or another free operating system, you might find quite difficult to interact with your geophysical device, without any dedicated software. As you might expect, you’re not the first to encounter this problem (you’re never going to be the first) and someone else already started working on a solution.

Tractatus Post Quem (tpq) by John Donovan is a

collection of tools useful to the archaeological geophysicist and surveyor, focussing on the conversion of data from proprietary formats, georeferencing them, and tagging with metadata.