Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

Back in Lancaster after a successful CAA conference and Archcamp. Just a quick post, as it has been a long day and other people have been tasked with providing the lowdown on it all. Archcamp provided us all with an opportunity for a demo and more in-depth discussion on some of the applications we’ve been working on, and other interesting things. It was also an opportunity for a visit to the University Archaeology department’s new building, which is very nice and has an extremely well-equipped computing lab.

We’re hoping for another archcamp fairly soon, with a few people agreeing to meet up at the international CAA conference in Berlin. If you’re interested, pop along to Antiquist, take a seat, have a cup of tea and make yourself known!

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Day Two of CAA 2007, and some more very interesting talks. A common theme today was the use of 3D modelling in archaeology, but approached from very different perspectives, and for differing uses. First up we had a talk about using 3D modelling as one of a barrage of techniques used to examine the visibility, or visual consumption of interior wall paintings in the ancient Greek settlement of Acrotiri. 3D modelling was used here alongside crowd-modelling techniques at both a macro- and meso-scale to highlight that the paintings would have been visible from a particular pinch-point in people’s movement through a street network. The modelling and advanced analysis here have added a new level of understanding about a site that would have been impossible previously.

On a simpler level, but nonetheless really useful, my colleague Leif demonstrated a program he has written to help record and analyse human skeletal remains, particularly when there is a large and complicated assemblage, such as in a burial pit. In the past it has been difficult, as commercial archaeologists with time and budgetary constraints, to record the position of the bones well enough to analyse them properly but Leif’s Crossbones package does just that. It’s a rare innovation that won’t take any longer to implement than the way things are currently done but it will improve the quality of the work no end. When he releases it (in a matter of weeks) it will be opensource and free as well! Hurrah!

Briefly, we also had talks on a 3D online catalogue of medieval timber building joints, and creating realistic 3D representations of past environments, including realistic lighting and particulates in the air (both vital to getting a proper impression of life inside a dark smoky hovel). Tom Goskar has been busy recreating the now submerged prehistoric landscape, complete with accurate representations of trees and animals, and another paper discussed whether we should include some measure of uncertainty in our reconstructions so that it is clear what is known and what is conjecture.

That actually leads me to discuss one of the other papers, as I think the idea of uncertainty is closely related to that of tagging and folksonomies. Mia Ridge discussed possible Web 2.0 uses in archaeology and cultural heritage, and one of the clear uses is allowing users to tag cultural objects, as you would photos in flickr or websites in del.icio.us. At first glance, this is a little scary as we like our standards and our proscribed ways of describing things. However, the world is messy, and there are multiple ways of describing most things, particularly archaeological monuments or artefacts where most of our knowledge is based on interpretation of incomplete evidence. Tagging allows people to acknowledge that uncertainty as well as allowing them to make more instinctive associations between things. Finally, I think we as archaeologists should acknowledge that what we do is quite specialised and a bit of a niche- which, as far as I know, makes us part of the Long Tail and we should exploit that.

Tomorrow we continue with ArchCamp 2- organised by Antiquist. It’s basically an opportunity for more archaeogeeky chat, and perhaps demos of some of the things we’ve all been working on. Best go back to work and get my demo sorted then…

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Crikey, day one and we’ve already had something like 15 talks. So where to start, since it’s all been great? These conferences are good because you get a real range of speakers, so we had a run down of twenty years of the archaeological computing MSc at the university here, the archaeology of Greenham Common protests, tracking the routes of students between two pubs in Cardiff and what that can tell us about phenomenology, using network analysis to study the interaction between the cities of Minoa, using “fireshed” analysis and the location of bullets and cases at Litle Bighorn to analyse the movements of the individual combatants, and last but not least a gallop through the varying ways that the International Documentation and Research Committee of ICOM (CIDOC) are trying to document archaeological monuments and the events (eg excavations and surveys) that bring them to light. I’ve no doubt missed a few people and apologise for that, but it’s late.

To focus on just a couple of the talks: I’m interested in the network analysis idea because I’m hoping to use it on a project I’m working on looking at the location of prehistoric settlements (mainly identified by clearance cairns or piles of stones to the uninitiated, which is where they cleared land for cultivation) in the Lake District Uplands. As well as being able to analyse the location of the sites within the landscape, can we look at the interaction between them using networks? I haven’t looked at this side of things before so I know nothing about it but hope to try it out at least.

I also liked Joseph Reeves’ idea of mapping the routes between pubs as a way of examining ideas of phenomenology. Not being an archaeological theorist, I had to go and look phenomenology up on google, but in archaeological terms it refers to the relationship between a person and the material world. This tends to lead to all sorts of discussions about the way neolithic man interacted with his landscape, but seems to assume some kind of deep conscious decision about most actions. What the relatively lighthearted experiment of plotting the routes people took between two Cardiff pubs showed was that sometimes people got lost and sometimes they were just more familiar with some routes than others. By getting the participants to record what was important to them as they walked along Joseph showed that it wasn’t the big historical monuments people were interested in, but the daffodils in the park, spending time with their partner, and whether they should take the shortcut and get muddy shoes but hopefully get to the pub quicker. The long and the short of this is that we shouldn’t always assume people did something because of some deep ritual siginificance, but that maybe they just took the same path every day because that was what they were used to. I like that approach- you can’t beat a bit of theory debunking to lighten up your afternoon!

Enough anyhow, till tomorrow

Edit:Darn, forgot to add my map!

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I’m in Southampton for the 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference. This is always a really interesting and often inspiring get together with a mix of commercial archaeologists such as myself and academic archaeologists (they normally have the best presentations).

There’s wifi available in my lovely salubrious Travelodge room, so I’ll aim to post some feedback on the first day’s talks tomorrow evening.
This post is also exciting for me, because I’m experimenting with the Geopress plugin for Wordpress. I first heard about it a few weeks ago but on my train journey today I read Andrew Turner’s great O’Reilly Shortcut book on Neogeography and that convinced me to give it a go…

I have to say that I really enjoyed Andrew’s book. He manages to cover the spectrum of “Neogeography” from the very basic intro to some reasonably high-end ideas such as microformats in a consistently easy and pleasant style. I learnt a lot from it, and there were certainly a few things I’m going to try (Geopress is the first).

Anyhow, here goes with the map:

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