It’s Tuesday morning of the final week of the archaeology team’s excavation at Pompeii, and everyone is buzzing.

The day before, a trove of artefacts was discovered inside a pit in an ancient Roman kitchen, and Tulane University professor Dr. Allison Emmerson, who is leading the dig, believes the team has not yet reached the bottom and all of its contents. Each new discovery provides a clue to unlocking the story behind the site and the people who used it.

Amid the tools used by archaeologists for centuries — trowels, buckets, brushes, and pickaxes — there’s a new piece of equipment: iPad Pro.

“iPad is the perfect archaeology machine,” says Dr.  Emmerson, who was part of the team that pioneered its use to record data on archaeological digs in 2010. She credits iPad with revolutionizing the field.

This summer, Dr. Emmerson — whose work focuses on ancient Roman communities that have largely been excluded from studies, such as women, the poor, and the enslaved — has made iPad Pro the centre of her team’s workflow. She believes it will once again reshape the field, thanks to capabilities like enhanced processing speed and battery life, the LiDAR Scanner, and the versatility of the Apple Pencil.