Abstract Three computer specialists and an anthropologist have created and developed an application called « HumanOs » to facilitate the registration of human bones from archaeological sites. This is a simple osteological data acquisition and management tool to deal with significant quantities of human skeletal remains, count and locate them.
An intuitive graphical user interface has been developed, allowing to add osteologic items in a dynamic and ergonomic way. The application is intended to be free, open source, nomadic, intuitive and suitable for any device support with an online version that operates on Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. An offline version, that can run on any local web development environment, is also downloadable to work when the archaeological site has no network connection available. The Université Paul Sabatier - Toulouse III will host the source code.
Regarding the use and after filling out the name of the archaeological site, the number of burial and skeleton (if several are available), the operator can easily record the presence and state of conservation of each bone with a specific color code (green : preserved to over 50%, orange : less than 50%, red : undetermined or white : missing). The user can move or zoom on the skeleton to reaveal underlying bones (cervical vertebrae under the skull and thoracic vertebrae under the sternum and the manubrium) with a mouse or with fingertips on tactile supports. The name of each bone appears as a banner on the support to confirm identification in order to help the operator, for example in the case of carpus bones. This application also allows to itemise the number of the skeleton conditioning bin and a commentary. All these information allow to rapidly process the material at the time of the study or delivery of collections to the State. The preservation schemas can be exported as vector image SVG files that can be used by all CAD softwares.
