For the Upper Colca Project the mobile GIS recording system produced both cartographic data for site report mapping, and GIS vectors for analysis. The results of these efforts are presented in chapter 6, where the cartographic output appears in local and regional maps. Automated cartography methods, such as one-to-many labeling through a VB script (discussed below), permitted the automated labeling of lab results based on field collections from polygons or points.

In the bigger picture, the incorporation of mobile GIS for scientific field research seems inevitable although the applicability of mobile GIS to specific applications depends largely on the extent to which mobile GIS meets research needs. Minor benefits of mobile GIS, such as the time and date stamp associated with every measurement, improve the data that are being gathered in unobtrusive ways. A more elaborate system might gather extensive metadata concerning research methods and data structure into an automatically generated digital log file. Additional tools, such as statistical summaries and visualization applications would have proved useful during the Upper Colca Survey but these are not yet available in a mobile GIS platform. The ability to estimate spatial variation measured on archaeological variables would have been useful for a more informed selection of sampling strategies, and perhaps for guiding the placement of test excavation units (Hodder and Orton 1976;Redman 1987). When researchers are able to investigate new spatial data in conjunction with existing datasets using the exploratory data analysis approach (Tukey 1977) while in the field it will open up original research strategies by combining information from new and existing digital datasets. Statistical indices, such as the degree of spatial autocorrelation among particular classes of data, would be useful to know in the field. Geostatistical methods such as kriging, familiar to archaeologists in lab analysis (Lloyd and Atkinson 2004), will have application in fieldwork contexts as well when these tools become available in future mobile GIS systems.