This blog is the home of Skelly-Pad – an App for archaeologists and forensic anthropologists to use to record skeleton and dental inventories. See Features for full details of what’s covered.
It’s been written as part of the dissertation for my BSc in Archaeology at the University of Reading, I’m an IT professional in normal life and couldn’t resist trying to come up with something better than a paper form. I’ll be using this blog to keep people informed of updates, get ideas about improvements and generally track the progress of the App – all comments will be gratefully received.
Archaeo-pad 
Hi,
This is the advanced version of an application my son made for me a few years ago. Mine was a very basic bone visual record to record what was available in each skeleton of a collection.
I was able to record 200 skeletons in 3 days so I know this can work in awkward conditions.
When I first heard you were planning this much more advanced system I was very keen to see what you would come up with. Now that it is done I will be keeping an eye on your updates to see it perfected. I will use it the next time (next year) I have to do a similar project and will practice with it in the mean time.
I wish you good luck with this, it is a brilliant concept and I am sure it will become a standard for all osteologists in the future. It will probably get very complicated eventually but try and keep it simple for the best usage. The visual rather than written record is so much faster.
What I lacked was the ability to draw my own lines on the diagram to note particular cracks, breaks and pathology for reference later. In big collections it would be good to link the visual with an automatic printable database record. That is where my attemps foundered! It got too complicated for me.
Good luck.
Ray
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Thanks for the kind words Ray – be great to hear how you get on using it in anger. You can produce an HTML printable version of the inventory though not sure how well that will cope with 200 skeletons. You can also export to Excel format for analysis – but I’m looking at also exporting the underlying database (which is SQLIte if anyone is interested) and possibly coming up with a standard XML format for skeletons that people could use to exchange data.
I’ve tried to design it so that people who want more complexity can have a different type of skeleton – eg adding in all the joints or proximal/medial/distal sections of long bones – rather than adding that detail for everyone. Hopefully that will enable me to keep the interface reasonably simple.
Will update this blog with any developments – thanks again
Gill
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