This article presents an innovative workflow for the acquisition and storage of archaeological data. The system is based on open-source software to enhance method replication and media accessibility. QGIS software is used as the central platform, connected to a spatial database developed in PostgreSQL and managed with the SQL and Python programming languages. The aim is to achieve an efficient, flexible, and reproducible digital method for data collection and management that can be applied to surface archaeological surveys. During the implementation and development of the method, we have recorded over 4,600 archaeological remains in two different structures with traces of Upper Paleolithic activity in the Lower Gallery of La Garma (Cantabria, Spain). After 18 months of continuous work, the results obtained demonstrate the usefulness and versatility of this procedure, which can be adapted to each context and to the specific needs of each researcher. Our goal is not simply to systematize archaeological documentation, as traditionally proposed, but to establish a simple and robust method for data collection and preservation, accessible to any user. Its fully open-source approach aims to promote a model that is nurtured by the use and contributions of the research community.

Zooarchaeologists routinely analyze assemblages that were initially sorted into major animal type (birds, mammals, fish, invertebrates) by students or lab technicians with varied backgrounds in zooarchaeology. Sorting errors are probably made in this initial phase, which can affect taxonomic representation and understanding of human–animal relationships. Recent study of the immense faunal assemblage (over 1 million NSP [Number of Specimens]) from Čḯxwicən (45CA523), a 2,700-year-old Lower Elwha Klallam village located on the coast of Washington (USA), allows us to systematically analyze trends in sorting errors. For example, 22.6% of the bird bones included in our sample were initially missorted into other taxonomic groups, primarily mammal, but also fish and invertebrate. Fish bones were less frequently missorted, but certain taxa with unusual elements were affected. More than one-fourth (27.3%) of all mammal bone chips (debitage from tool production) were missorted. Failure to recognize and mitigate these errors could lead to significant biases. Lab managers need to recognize the potential for sorting error at the beginning and train lab technicians in the kinds of faunal remains they will be encountering, including distinctive elements. Collaborative researchers need to develop protocols for transferring specimens, and scholars working with “legacy collections” should not assume the collections were sorted correctly.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women from Northern Rio Grande pueblos joined Ndee communities in western Kansas, where they made a local version of unpainted Tewa red ware. We investigate potential slip materials in the eastern High Plains and adjacent Central Plains, using CIELAB color data to graph red hue variation in collected pigments and slipped archaeological ceramics from 14SC1 and 14SC304. Although use of the CIELAB color system by archaeologists is well established, our approach is unique in its use of a* and b* graphs to describe and compare hue. Our graphs illustrate hue variation between red and yellow on the color wheel, facilitating comparisons and communicating color patterns more effectively than is possible using the Munsell system. We demonstrate that potters could have reproduced the red hues of Northern Rio Grande red ware in the different geological landscape of the Great Plains. Our collected pigments systematically vary in hue by geological formation or system. Two sampled geological formations in the eastern High Plains and adjacent Central Plains include pigments that fire to the “right” red, or the red hues of Northern Rio Grande red slips, and potters may have used one or both.

It remains a little-known fact that from March 1766 to May 1767 Jean-Jacques Rousseau – fleeing from persecution in France and Switzerland – stayed in the remote hamlet of Wootton in Staffordshire. There he composed the first half of his Confessions in a garden hermitage, a structure half natural and half architectural, ever since known as Rousseau’s Cave. Our paper records the hermitage in its current state (exposed to the elements); it creates a digital reconstruction of the hermitage as it was in Rousseau’s lifetime; and it provides digital access to a monument that is otherwise not generally accessible.

Our paper records a modest but fairly typical eighteenth-century garden hermitage and also, with the highest quality digital reconstructions and fly-throughs, provides a new insight into the creation of one of the world’s greatest works of literature.

The paper contributes substantial new material to the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and also contributes to garden history and the phenomenon of the garden hermitage.