iArchaeology

Using an iPad at Pompeii

As the Google tricycle tricycles around Rome Apple is off to Pompeii. A new advertisement on the Apple website shows a team of archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati under Dr. Steven Ellis using 6 iPads helping to record the findings of a new site near the main thoroughfare of Pompeii.

I’m a little worried for my chum Joseph over at Digital Finds who has had an on-site digital recording system ready to go in 6 months for the last 3 years. However I’m sure he’ll manage to pick at least a few holes in using (the) iPad for just this sort of thing.

I haven’t used iDraw but can’t really imagine drawing detailed 1:20 plans with my stubby finger on a nice shiny screen especially when the British winter starts to hit. Two of the photos are used for reference – wall construction techniques and ‘to establish the chronological context of  pottery’ using a program which seems to draw Harris Matrices. Well, I’m sure it’s nice to have something to help one remember the difference between a wall that’s squared random to one that is squared, built to courses  but a couple of days on an urban or industrial site will hammer that sort of thing home. I’m not sure, however, that the fellow using (the) iPad for his pottery analysis really needs to be leaning on a wall on site, surely those finds’ people like being tucked up inside somewhere with a bit of Radio 2 gently eroding their sanity, but there you.

I suppose the main problem with this is that I’m just jealous. I did have a quick play with (an) iPad in Sydney airport recently and got bored relatively quickly I did however leave this venerable blog as the homepage on its browser so maybe some good will come from these overgrown iPhones, we shall see (but probably not on site in the UK in the next few months).

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So…Australia…

It’s been a while since I came to Australia and there’s not been alot of posts, but I’m back (if the digital realm conforms to spatial metaphors). I arrived in Sydney about four months ago and stayed there for 4 days. I didn’t like Sydney that much, the Opera House and harbour were nice but generally it is quite a bland, generic western city (apparently one of the reasons it was used in the Matrix).  Being more of a countryside person this may be to be expected but I did quite like Melbourne which I visited recently and shall be returning to soon. The one particular thing I noticed about Sydney (unlike most modern European cities) was the lack of churches.  Possibly it was just the lack of older buildings, churches being the most obvious representations of this.  Oh yes and Sydney introduced me to the Australian phenomenon of hideously annoying pedestrian crossing sirens.  These are only my immediate impressions as I rapidly departed for Albury, a country city (sic), on the banks of the River Murray.

Indigeneous Excavation

I’ve been working on a  bypass section of the Hume Highway which connects Sydney to Melbourne. A walkover survey was previously conducted for the collection and recording of Indigenous artefacts. In this area of New South Wales the huge majority of these are made of quartz and consist of knapped cores and flakes with a few blades of chert and the occasional pieces of hammerstone.  The areas identified are referred to as ‘Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Sites’. An anthropological survey, with local elders, was also undertaken which sought ‘Aboriginal Cultural Sites’ which, I understand, are known from social memory and were avoided by the highway expansion.

The Aboriginal cultural heritage sites were generally found on spurs of land jutting into the floodplain of small creeks, all on post-contact cleared  farmland used for grazing.  We dug 1m² squares at 15m intervals along 5m offset staggered transects down to Pleistocene clay deposits which mark the beginning of local human habitation. This was done by professional archaeologists and an equal number of Aboriginal cultural representatives, reps, who ‘have an interest in the heritage of the area’. The test pits were dug by hand in bulk, initally, with all the excavated material sieved  with water and the artefacts found kept, given a basic analysis and counted. The pits with larger than average,  amounts of quartz flakes, cores and debitage, for that site,  were enlarged 1m² at a time and in spits determined by the depth of the underlying clays, these were referred to as  ‘open areas’. The length of time spent increasing the sizes of open areas was not dependent on declining numbers of artefacts but on the time allocated to each site.

This project finished last week, and to be honest I was rather glad. Everyone I worked with was friendly, but the lack of features was disappointing especially after the novelty of digging metre square holes in fields wore off. I did learn more about stone artefacts which previously I knew little about and my sections, previously ok,  have have improved to an almost ridiculous degree. I may come back with some gripes about the methodology later but am currently travelling about Tasmania in a campervan and it’s dinner time. The next post should not be so long in the writing, thanks loyal readers!

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A new ShELP page

Just a quick note to mention there is a long awaited new ShELP page. It’s referred to as a Landscape in Haiku although I believe it is actually a renga form of poetry but I’ve never heard of that! Why not have a gander, and in the words of Luis, make some comments!

ShELP, a landscape in Haiku

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airscape

It’s been a long time since my last post. I have a lot of written thoughts that I would try to post bit by bit, and the one about aerial photography is a good point to star with. Especially because it has been largely acknowledged in the blog, but we have never come across a discussion.

Appart from the information about different sites, we should recapture the spirit of discussion which this project started with. Everything is very interesting (I’ll come back later to post some replies for the latest news). Furthermore, I’d really want to know your opinion (written or spoken) about the limits and possibilities of aerial photography.

While doing the report for the module I have started thinking about this, and also seen the discussion in a spanish website (arqueología del paisaje).
I have written some words on the subject, but I prefer you to start the discussion and then I’ll post my ideas. I think that we can come up with a nice conclusion (or maybe not).

Some of the main issues in my opinion are:
- aerial photography understood as an end and not as a mere methodology.
- A matter of soils: where can we gather information from?
- Which sites and which phases of them are represented?
- Especially important: how can we understand the relationship between elements (lines in the photographs) and establish some kind of hierarchy?

Limits and possibilities, what do you think?

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Pitcalc

Hey just thought i’d throw this out, sorry dont have time to write anything up about it but i may do at a later date!

http://www.pitcalc.com/index

If you like archaeology, site planning , the 80s and the Sinclair Spectrum then this is for you!

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OpenStreetMap

more about “Animation of OpenStreetMap Edits in 2…“, posted with vodpod

Here is a great wiki designed for creating a copyleft map of the world. It’s a user generated, free, editable map that can be used by anybody. All you need is to go for a stroll with a GPS then come home and upload the data to the site, tag it and off you go to being your own Herman Moll.

What’s great is that there is a specific set of tags for historic elements on the map and these can be futher refined if need be. So everyone out there in Sheffield and beyond go and have a go!

(the above video is a rather snazzy rendering of the data contributed over 2008 to OpenStreetMap  created by the folks at http://www.itoworld.com/ as found on the infosthetics blog which can be found here.)

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Stonehenge Visualisation

Just came across this on youtube and thought it was an interesting way of presenting data from Lidar and analysing it. I also thought it was interesting that the author is using new technology but still using old interpretations of the data and how much the way the designer ‘flys’ us through the landscape influences our own interpretation. Lidar presented in this way gives a much clearer view of the archaeology but one must lose the feelings evoked and observations made when actually being in the landscape, on the ground!

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Mayans, muons and archaeologists

UT Maya Muon Tomography

Someting strange is happening in the forests of the Maya…

Particle physicists and archaeologists are getting together with a muon tomographic imager. These are usually left down deep dark holes to watch which cosmic rays are whizzing through the world and us all the time. However one of these machines is now being put to good use. It is going to be left near ‘structure 1′ in the forest in NW Belize. Over the coming weeks and months it’ll generate a picture of the internal dimensions of structure 1. It does this by recording 3 dimensionally the quantity of muons hitting it, thus if they’ve gone through solid wall there will be less of them than if some went through an empty room, thus a density map is created which can be made into a plan. Amazingly at the metre scale the machine would work upto 50-80m from its target!

L.W. Alvarez used this in the 60s on the Second Pyramid of Chephren in Egypt to find internal chambers. The technique worked but no chambers were found.

It’ll be interesting to see the results this time.

UT Maya Muon Tomography

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Soundscape

Sight has been privileged in landscape studies since its very beginning; we should think to that as a consequence of our first approach to landscape and as a result of the different theorisations about it.

Reacting to the preeminence of viewing authors like Cosgrove, Daniels, Ingold… have tried to change our understanding of landscape and the methods we use in its study.

Mlekuz’s article about soundscapes could be understood in this sense of encouraging ‘new ways of approaching landscapes’. Which is the role of hearing in our view of landscape? Which is the importance of that in interpreting past societies from their remains?

The example we bring up today is very useful for discussion in two aspects:a methodological one, Which is the role of GIS unravelling landscapes? and a more theoretical aspect, what perspectives do we privilege in our study of landscape? which is the point on adding as much sense as possible?

Churches in Polhograjsko hribovje (Slovenia). A digital model of acoustic space

The article is published in Internet Archaeology 16, 2004.

http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue16/mlekuz_toc.html

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