Mobile Computing with Near Field Communication (NFC) Smart Objects Applied to Archaeological Research

In this work, a mobile system designed to manage information at an excavation site is presented. A group of wireless devices connected to the telephone network, send the data collected by different users to a common database. At the same time, every archaeological finding is integrated into the information system when it is tagged with a NFC transponder that can communicate with the mobile devices equipped with a NFC interface. In this way, the identification code attached to the element together with the information recorded inside the memory of the NFC tag determine which system services automatically start up, which tasks are requested to the user and which actions must be prevented or unless warned as undesirable along the entire process of the archaeological research. This technique improves archaeological work in several ways. First, it speeds up the process of collecting, saving, updating and duplicating the data associated with every piece of material. Second, smart NFC objects helps researchers to make decisions about the next steps in the archaeological research, because they stored the information that determines the necessities of every artifact. Third, it reduces human error in transcribing information or in performing incorrect actions with a specific material. This work extends the use of NFC technology and mobile systems to a new field, the archaeological research.