Mobile GIS

You are surveying a broad, featureless plain and the planned coverage area is delimited in a Geographic Information System (GIS), but how do you rapidly locate your starting position and line up your survey crew with few landmarks? Your Global Positioning System (GPS) will get you to the survey area, but figuring out the coordinates is time consuming. Ideally, local maps and imagery, the survey coverage area, and yesterday’s coverage are available on a screen with your current GPS position indicated. You have discovered a site consisting of lithic concentrations of different material types, and each looks like a distinctive reduction event, but you only have 45 minutes to record and collect at the site. Using common GPS methods, you can map each concentration as a polygon feature, assign an ID number to it, document and collect it, and attribute it later. Alternately, you open the “lithic locus” geometry in a mobile GIS and map in each concentration. The GIS assigns a new ID number to the locus,..