Archaeology... it's the future!

[oldgirl]

quote:Originally posted by Dirty Dave Lincoln

After 3 now..3,2,1- "always look on the bright side of life"

Sorry, I came in after 3 so was out of time! [:I]

[mercenary]

quote:Originally posted by vulpes

Flippin' eck Mercenary did I read it wrong or did you say something nice about curators?

Think so.:face-huh: I love curators, but wouldn't wanna be one.

[BAJR Host]

Retention... a sore subject just now!

If archaeology is to have a future... skills must be built on, people retained who have these skills, and skills utilised.

No point in having a digital recording system, with nobody to actually use it!

I am training in GPS survey in february.. and showing how to use it for advanced landscape survey.. these people can then utilise the skill.. and hopefully be prized by the group who employ them.

Training seems to be coming back into the thread again!

(I was counting up my time as well now... blinkin flip... 25 years .. yer, right.... I did not break! but I is sorely bent )



"I don't have an archaeological imagination.."
Borekickers

[Dirty Dave Lincoln]

I think taking the time to learn extra skills has got to be a positive thing for archaeology,not only do we have extra selling points for ourselves when it comes to getting or keeping jobs but we have to accept that archaeology is using more and more technology all the time.
If a luddite like me can put his wooden clogs away and come into the 20th century-anyone can!

[gorilla]

26 years for me! Some call it masochism, I call it work. I've been bent, twisted, broken, fixed, broken, fixed and broken again. Now, I work in a rubber-walled room and have blunt crayons to draw with.

Still learning how to do this job though... haven't perfected it yet.

[Weegie]

28 years for me, I'm afraid. I did get broken once, but a physiotherapist fixed me.

Having been away for a few days (editing a report from I site I directed in 1980!), I've missed a few comments on my earlier posts. Apologies for back-tracking, but there were a couple of good questions, and it would be rude not to reply.

Delilah? My my my, Dr Peter, that is going back a long way. This is a completely different beast, not least because it's working and has support...

Mercenary asked about paper records. We use these initially to get data back to the computer, but the site archive will be digital, so we plan to recycle the paper at the end of assessment. This is still too much double-handling; we have looked into using PDAs for the entering of context data, and are aware of the work that others are doing and have done in this area.I hope that we will move to those in future. Would what we are doing work for a commercial unit? Honestly, I don't know. We made a business case for this based on an analysis of our data-flows and our user needs, and each organisation would have to do the same. It does increase costs at excavation and site archive creation, but the payoff is in speed of assessment and analysis. Our colleagues in Sweden, who have been using this system widely for several years, claim that its use saves c. 30% of analysis costs, and we will be testing this on our own projects. I know that other organisations are developing systems based on open-source software, and if that works out it should be even more cost-effective.

We've also moved to entirely digital photography, a move our photographer colleagues elsewhere in EH made some time ago. Film processing was getting more difficult to procure, and we've agreed standards and archiving methodologies with our chums in the NMR. Hard copies can still be printed out on archival-quality paper for those archives/curators that insist on it.

I agree with Mercenary on the potential of close-range colour photogrammetry. The ability to process these images quickly on site and to add layers of interpretative data was essential to the recording process at Silbury, and in my view it worked extremely well. More recently I've seen some fantastic work done at Wilanow Palace near Warsaw by Polish National Heritage Board (Kobidz) archaeologists where colour photogrammetry of soft deposits and masonry structures was carried out, with interpretation added, and the results seemed to be the most effective integration of buildings and excavation recording and presentation that I've seen so far.

Keen to know more about Dr Peter's total station feature detection, but I hae ma doobts. But I imagine it depends what you're recording.

Brian

Resistance is futile. Your project documentation will be MoRPHE-compliant.

[kevin wooldridge]

I have also been a little out of touch in the past week or two but seem strangley attracted to discussion fora that mention Intrasis and similar systems....

My view is that a paper-free site is actually an impossibility (we may be losing a little in translation from the Swedish here), but that a paper-lite site is not only possible but a reality in many parts of the European archaeological millieu. I think the main problem to 'paper-free' is largely one of how to handle free-text in a digital environment and despite the fact that you might replace a notebook with a PDA, you still in effect have to make notes to supplement the digital recording. I have yet to see a digital recording system (and that includes Intrasis) that is capable of recording and processing stratigraphic relationships (and I mean intuitive 'stratigraphic' relationships rather than the physicality of most GIS systems), and for that reason alone all current digital systems require some kind of additional input. I would also be delighted to meet (and buy a drink for) the first archaeologist who isn't a raving lunatic and has the confidence to enter their 'site matrix' directly into a digital system without first making a hard copy, (just to check its integrity).

Peter Wardle's suggestion of the total station 'feature detector' is already a reality and in use, if infact he meant a laser scanner. I have heard of experiments using a laser scanner mounted with a digital camera that allows site scanning to be controlled from an 'office' environment and I understand this system was demonstrated at the recent Norwegian CAA conference in Oslo. The Sjøfartsmuseet (Maritime museum) of the University of Oslo have been using laser scanning to record ship excavations in the Oslo fjord and to digitally record the Øseberg viking ship.

(http://www.nrk.no/programmer/tv/schrodin.../1.1852993)

There are also companies interested in developing this system further using archaeological data as a control for a myriad of other potential uses in much the smae way as IBM crunched archaeological data in the 80's looking at the use of its computer systems for other applications.

I agree with Brian about the potential use of digital photography to enhance and supplement the digital archaeological record and am a keen advocate of the system here in my little part of Norway for sites of all periods. Again and maybe the same Polish team, demonstrated the potential for the use of different forms of digital photography at the Oslo CAA conference.

However, as well as the challenges of embracing technology and perhaps a change in traditional recording methods, there are other areas in UK archaeology where I think digital recording might cause a few hearts to flutter. Whilst I think digital recording can overall create cost savings on archaeological projects, it does require a greater resource input at the field end. The kind of interpretive detail required at the point of data input makes the current UK 'neat' division between excavation and post-excavation work slightly blurred. And that may concern the funders of archaeology. (As well as suggesting that EH needs to swiftly get onto rewriting MAP2, MAP3, MAP4 etc)

The use of digital recording can for the same reasons affect both the manner and up-front pricing of archaeological tenders, particularly where overall cost savings involving post-ex aren't factored into the tender process. I guess that one of the reasons EH are able to trial Intrasis on in-house projects is because they are largely free of the pressures of having to tender for such projects. (I wait for Brian to shoot me down on that point...)

And inevitably any cost-savings in UK archaeology are likely to result in less jobs for archaeologists. Although (and maybe to raise the fears and hackles of many BAJRites), those of us that are left will be better trained and more confident, in a smaller jobs market, of improving job security and pay and conditions across the board.

[drpeterwardle]

Kevin Wooldridge said,

"Peter Wardle's suggestion of the total station 'feature detector' is already a reality and in use, if infact he meant a laser scanner."

No I didnt I mean a total station that can survey semi-automatically due to be launched this year. How well it will work surveying excavated archaeological features remains to be seen. What will very well is recording buildings.

Peter Wardle

[Weegie]

No incoming fire from me, Kevin, that's a fair point. We may have other pressures on us, but we are in a fortunate position. We do, of course, have to disseminate the results of these trials (and of the projects too, of course) so that others can make up their minds about the pros and cons of this approach.

The point about digital and 'paper-lite' systems requiring greater resourcing during fieldwork and site archive creation is a good one. We did raise our time estimates considerably for Richborough and Dover to take account of this, and will be reviewing these at site archive completion to see how those estimates worked out in practice.

I'm growing more and more intrigued by Dr Peter's semi-automatic total station. Can't wait to try one out on one of our multi-phase brick buildings at Fort Cumberland!

Brian

Resistance is futile. Your project documentation will be MoRPHE-compliant.

[Hal Dalwood]

Continuing with the relentless gee-whizz flavour of the discussion, would anyone like to comment as users on the VERA project, being developed at Silchester, and trailled recently on Britarch?
http://vera.rdg.ac.uk/
Can anyone make a comparison between VERA and Intrasis?

Further question: what is it about the names given by UK archaeologists to archaeological software e.g. 'Delilah', 'Vera'?

Hal Dalwood

Bad archaeologist, worse husband