It's called post docs

> or require less human toiling?

post-docs are humans too...

technically, yes...

Well... It depends...

There's ground-penetrating_radar but that just helps you know where to toil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar

Hmm, turns out there is a whole wiki page devoted to that and other methodologies for archaeological surveying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophysical_survey_(archaeolog...

Non-invasive technologies are super-cool because we may not actually want to disturb stuff until we have the technology to do it properly. Some stuff we may never want to disturb for cultural or other reasons.

Just stressing the "other reasons" part. In some countries people actually advocate for leaving stuff like this buried for fear of corrupt gov. officials handing off what they find to smugglers.

Also one of the last professions to be automated in the future because of complexity/specialization vs monetary benefit :)

There was recently a segment on 60 Minutes about using satellite data, such has been very effective in some cases: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/space-archaeology-transforms-how...

> have there ever been any advances in this field to make the process go faster

Speed Archaeology! https://youtu.be/m11VH-dUPEk ;)

That might be an interesting project. Deep learning + a headset camera thing.

Small observation: I worked on a dinosaur dig in Montana for 2 summers as a teen. a major problem was not identification of the bones in our case, but the fragility of the bones we were digging. Maybe 50% of our time was flaking rock away slowly with a an icepick, sweeping up the crushed rock, putting it in a bucket, and moving the crushed rock to a tailings pile. Each dedicated quadrant of the dig had its own tailings pile (1x1x1M of rock had its own pile) in case a pice of fragment was lost.

I know that low cost survey Lidar will really help, and that RTK GPS is also improving things. On larger digs, documentation with drones is also likely to produce better incremental tracking of progress. But, for this to be better, improving the actual digging is still a big unsolved problem.

EDIT: the other 50% of our time was: 40% reassembling bones with superglue in an air conditioned room. (pleasant for the temperature, but maddeningly frustrating work)

10% dig notation, journaling, discussion, planning, survey, etc.

taking lots of images + mechanical turk?

Paleontologists in this case.