Google Street View targets Rome

So back in Britain after my sojourn in the antipodes has left me jobless down in Cornwall. I popped into the Cornwall Historic Environment Service to ask for some volunteer work with them but ironically they were too busy to get me started. Sso off to an interview with the RCAHMS in Edinburgh I went  to work on a Historic Land Use Assessment project which, as I found out yesterday, has left me jobless for a little longer, there we go.

Suffering from insomnia, not from the economic uncertainty of being without an income or the larger problem of any Giddensian existential uncertainty about, well whatever, I watched a bit of BBC News 24 this morning. And how exciting it was, there was an archaeological headline (well, almost) about Rome, or some insidious multinational taking pictures of Rome anyway. There they were, people, like the above photo, peddling around in a rather wobbly fashion going where no (tri)cycling paparazzi has gone before, the Roman Forum. Apparently this will be more detailed than ‘either Stonehenge or Pompeii’, we shall have to wait until the end of the year for the results. Hopefully it means I won’t have to actually go to Rome and can enjoy the world of tourism safely from my kitchen.

Here is a short video of the Google tricycles in action (with a rather snappy soundtrack),

The BBC story  is available here.

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Los Angeles – then and now

The Los Angeles Times recently  had an online article showing two photos of the same place in downtown LA 50 years apart. At first it’s hard to convince oneself they are the same scene, ironically the only parts which seem the same are roads – which are in constant motion! It is amazing that in quite a relatively short space of time such changes can occur, and this isn’t on the edges of a city in the process of being built.

It makes me think of what Levi-Strauss said of cities in the New World,

The cities of the New World have one characteristic in common: that they pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage. One of my Brazilian girl-students returned in tears from her first visit to France: whiteness and cleanness were the criteria by which she judged a city, and Paris, with its blackened buildings, had seemed to her filthy and repugnant. But American cities never offer that holiday-state, outside of time, to which great monuments can transport us; nor do they transcend the primary urban function and become objects of contemplation and reflection. What struck me about New York, or Chicago, or their southerly counterpart Sao Paulo, was not the absence of ‘ancient remains’; this is, on the contrary, a positive element in their significance. So far from joining those European tourists who go into sulks because they cannot add another thirteenth-century cathedral to their collection, I am delighted to adapt myself to a system that has no backward dimension in time; and I enjoy having a different form of civilization to interpret. If I err, it is in the opposite sense: as these are new cities, and cities whose newness is their whole being and their justification, I find it difficult to forgive them for not staying new for ever. The older a European city is, the more highly we regard it; in America, every year brings with it an element of disgrace. For they are not merely ‘newly built’; they are built for renewal, and the sooner the better. When a new quarter is run up it doesn’t look like a city, as we understand the word; it’s too brilliant, too new, too high-spirited. It reminds us more of our fairgrounds and temporary international exhibitions. But these are buildings that stay up long after our exhibitions would have closed, and they don’t last well: facades begin to peel off, rain and soot leave their marks, the style goes out of fashion, and the original lay-out is undermined when someone loses patience and tears down the building next door. It is not a case of new dries contrasted with old, but rather of cities whose cycle of evolution is very rapid as against others whose cycle of evolution is slow. Certain European cities are dying off slowly and peacefully; the cities of the New World have a perpetual high temperature, a chronic illness which prevents them, for all their everlasting youthfulness, from ever being entirely well.

What astonished me in Sao Paulo in 1935, and in New York and Chicago in 1941, was not their newness, but the rapidity with which time’s ravages had set in. I knew that these cities had started ten centuries behind our own, but I had not realized, somehow, that large areas in them were already fifty years old and were not ashamed to let it be seen. For their only ornament was their youth, and youth is as fugitive for a city as for the people who live in it. Old ironwork, trams red as fire-engines, mahogany bars with balustrades of polished brass; brickyards in deserted alleys where the wind was the only street-cleaner; countrified parish churches next door to office buildings and stock exchanges built in the likeness of cathedrals; apartment-houses green with age that overhung canyons criss-crossed with fire-escapes, swing-bridges, and the like; a city that pushed continually upwards as new buildings were built on the ruins of their predecessors: such was Chicago, image of the Americas, and it isn’t surprising that the New World should cherish in Chicago the memory of the 188os, for this modest perspective, less than a century in extent, is all that antiquity can mean in those parts. To our millenary cities it would hardly serve even as a unit of judgement, but in Chicago, where people do not think in terms of time, it already offers scope for nostalgia.

Taken from Triste Tropiques (emphasis added) 1961. Available at http://www.archive.org/stream/tristestropiques000177mbp/tristestropiques000177mbp_djvu.txt

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Digital landscapes

In 2003 the the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian in Oxford, Cambridge University library and Trinity College Dublin were given powers under an act of Parliament to make a copy of every free website based in the UK as part of their efforts to record Britain’s cultural, scientific and political history, in much the same way a copy of every book published in the UK has to be deposited in one of the above libraries. However these powers have not been implemented, the Guardian reports. This is known as an e-legal deposit and is necessary to circumvent copyright laws which would normally stop the copying of such websites such as online newspapers.

However, now Margaret Hodge is pushing for the implementation of these powers to stop the losing of data and historical sources from the internet. This is unlikely to happen before the next election due to legal and technical issues, and after yesterday I’m sure Mr Brown has other concerns! This sort of loss of digital history was made clear last year when the old GeoCities free web hosting service was shut down in October meaning one of the first generation of home-made websites has been wiped.

Now, while this news doesn’t have the most direct link to a blog ostensibly about landscape archaeology it does lead rather nicely to this news piece from those bastions of mis-information, The Onion -

While this is rather amusing I think in the future past websites will be used for researching history (and archaeology?), well all the landscapers of the future have to do is read A Place Odyssey!

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Google Stonehenge, Google Pompeii, Google Iraq (and France too!)

Google Streetview

Well, Google have been busy recently. I noticed Martin, from Liverpool Landscapes, had found  Google has added Stonehenge to it’s Streetview, here at least there probably won’t be any complaints form locals about privacy, although there’s a policeman somewhere near the entrance to the tunnel who you can’t quite see. There is similiar way of experiencing Stonehenge if you use Microsoft’s Photosynth which I prefer; you can move around more freely and even go along and take your own photos and upload them.

View Larger Map

Both of these types of visualising landscapes are surely a step in the right direction but both of them create a rather disjointed experience. I have been to Stonehenge and thus use these websites more to jog my memory and enhance it’s visual aspect over the purely mental or emotional but I’m not sure how cohesive a sensation it would be for someone not to have previously visited the stones. Luckily Google have added the ruins of Pompeii to Streetview as well. And yes, it is a little disorientating (I haven’t been to Pompeii), especially with the blurriness as the image pans along. The mini map in the corner helps, although I found it hard to actually find the ruins in the first place (try searching for “pompeii, italy ruins”). However, my feeble criticisms aside, these are great tools.

Google in Iraq

Google have also been busy in Iraq, they will soon begin digitising artefacts and documents from Iraq’s National Museum. 14,000 digital images will be available next year for free to view, however it isn’t made clear what further uses the images could be used for. It’d be great if rather than just taking traditional photos they could use some Photosynth-like method so you could ‘move’ round the artefact and see it from all directions. We’ll see.

France in Iraq

I also read an article last week about France’s involvement in Iraq. I have only found other references to this in online Chinese newspapers which seems odd. The news is that French and Iraqi ministers have signed two cooperation agreements on defense, culture and science which is good, but the last paragraph mentions archaeology directly,

“According to French analysts, France needs an aiding center in Iraq to help French entrepreneurs who are interested in making investment in Iraq, as well as provide supports to French research in agriculture and archaeology in the country.”

I don’t often see archaeology gaining such a profile but maybe Sarkozy is getting the bug, I hear he recently visited the excavation of an Australian and British First World War group burial site at Pheasant Wood,  Fromelles, northern France, although I’m sure this was a matter of politics rather than pure interest.

Update: I have been informed by who I presume to be the Fromelles Project Manager that President Sarkozy hasn’t visited Pheasent Wood. I’ll have a word with my supposed sources!

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Dartmoor’s new past

Tottiford Reservoir, north east Dartmoor has recently been drained by South West Water to show a previously unknown ceremonial complex. A local man noticed two stone rows and some cairns and informed the National Park Authority who then surveyed the area and confirmed there was a standing stone, a double stone row, a single stone row a series of cairns, a stone circle 22m wide and many flint tools.

Great stuff, there has been some geophysics done in the area before the reservoir is filled up, although there are no plans of the site on the Park website. The site being in a reservoir would seem odd as I thought most of these types of sites had at least one larger vista. It seems amazing though that there are no antiquarian accounts of this complex, what I’d like now is for Chris Tilley to put on a deep sea diving suit and give us a phenomenlological account of strolling about the area!

This area has until now had a relative lack of such sites which means it will be even more interesting to see the results of the survey and how it complements the previously known prehistoric archaeological features on Dartmoor, which is well known for the clarity of it’s relict landscape.

http://www.dartmoor-npa.gov.uk/au_totarchpr1109

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The Battle of Bosworth and the Landscape Lab

So the site of the Battle of Bosworth has moved. What does this mean? My immediate reaction was ‘not that much’, which I put down to my not overwhelming interest in the period or battlefield archaeology, plus the fact that the ‘new’ field is only 2 miles to the south west. Where a place of mass violence took place is, within reason, considered less important than what took place there; Richard III still died and this led to the rise of the Tudor dynasty. However there have been artefacts found on the new site including 22 lead roundshot and larger munitions which are among the earliest examples of their kind. This will add greatly to our understanding of late medieval warfare, apparently.

 

I recently completed my Masters degree and get my results tomorrow, exciting indeed. However since I left, ‘our building’ has been refurbished which included moving the Landscape Lab where my coursemates and I spent much of our time. What interests me though, is that the Landscape Lab still exists, with the same equipment, resources and lecturers in the same building but in a different place. The new students may indeed be unaware of the recent changes in the internal architecture of West Court. What does this mean to the sense of place of the Landscape Lab? The same things will occur in there; lectures, seminars, cake, and Bob and Colin will act in the same positions, as teachers. The only real difference is the relative place of the Landscape Lab. Previously it was at the end of corridor, past Colin’s and opposite Bob’s offices; it is now at the other end of the building on more of a thoroughfare. Practically this changes the proximity of Bob’s and Colin’s offices and stops the fire door from being opened to cool the room. Socially this means it’s less easy to engage Bob and/or Colin and loiter for help, it also means we can’t sneak outside for biscuits.

 

How this change of relative placing of the Landscape Lab will affect the next year’s Landscapees is unknown, if they have any insights already it’d be good to hear them. Otherwise I’ve just been informed Levi-Strauss has died so better get something down about the opposition between Landscape Labs and Battlefields.

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Don’t worry, Ive found a brush…

So there we are, up in Edinburgh there is an archaeologist using a brush, he’s digging up some skeletons ahead of Edinburgh’s new tram system being constructed. There’s a video here which shows some of the other they’ve found, to be honest it all looks quite interesting. Although there is no mention or shot of a minibus Sorina Spanou from Headland Archaeology does think the public think they maybe from The (sic) Time Team, which is nice.

This post was taken from a story found on the Edinburgh Evening News website here.

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Some less exciting goings on in Staffordshire

Well I suppose we should have something here about all the gold being found in a field in Staffordshire. But I’m very busy writing my dissertation so I’ll leave it to the above video to do the talking. One thing that did catch my cynical side was the assertion that the people of Staffordshire should be proud of this find. I’ not sure why a pot of gold laid down over a millenia ago and found quite randomly should impact the self-esteem of the current inhabitants of the area is beyond me.

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Where are the toothbrushes?

This time lapse video is taken from the Tipping
Street car park development currently being undertaken in
Stafford. What is interesting for us is that it shows the archaeology
being undertaken prior to the construction. As can be seen there are
no fedora hats being worn or small brushes cleaning away at mammoth
bones. This instead shows British commercial archaeology as it is; the
archaeologists, wearing their high visibility clothing and hard hats
are virtually indistinguishable from the demolition team. There is
ample use of a 360° mechnical excavator (a ‘machine’) and dumper
trucks for moving the tonnes of spoil. In fact the only thing to indicate that archaeologists are present is the ubiquitous minibus, see
here!
I don’t want to seem uninspiring or attempting to remove the
glamour (!?) of archaeology but this is how a majority of excavations
are carried out in the UK. We aren’t always cleaning away at the
inscribed walls of beatiful temples as our friends are finding some
great hoard of gold (although some of Staffordshire is a bit more like
this, see here). Here, as on many sites across Britain diggers work away
emptying victorian cellars and other less than exciting features.
However the process of uncovering the unknown is interesting even if
it doesn’t lead to groundbreaking discoveries and if done with a good
team is quite an enjoyable experience and one to be proud of, and with no toothbrush in sight!

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August

So the summer is upon us and we’ve all been very busy as is evident from the lack of exciting posts! I spent a week digging in north Wales at Abergwyngregyn. It’s the third season of work there and a return after a couple of years off. The weather was changeable at best but there should be some good results.  I’m now writing my dissertation on upland rural settlements of northern Wales from the late medieval period. PeteT went off to Fountains Abbey and dug part of an old manor house. He started off surveying the area and doing some geophysics with Drew then Clare and I did a bit of digging. Luis has disappeared off to Spain but is due for an eminent return. Drew and Clare have got the summer off from academic work as they’re studying again next year, the lucky pair, although Clare has been wandering around Broomhead Moor again looking for triangular stones!

As an aside, I have just found a rather nice short video of a large landscape, the World, and how it is seen from space. This is part of the Bella Gaia project, have a look at the video here with the project homepage here, http://www.bellagaia.com/

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