Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

Suddenly, in a couple of aggregated feeds that I subscribe to, I’m starting to see feeds of people’s comments, and individual posts from mailing lists. This doesn’t work for me in the slightest, as they are both snippets of conversations or threads, without real context when seen on their own. If people are interested in comments to a given post then surely they will subscribe to them anyway?

Solution- unsubscribe from the aggregated feed and go through and subscribe to the individual feeds that I’m interested in. To be honest, it’s well overdue, but a pain nonetheless…

After a week away on the Isle of Skye in Scotland (with no computers, no phones, great weather and gorgeous landscape, but more midges than any sane person really needs) I had over 1000 rss feed items to read, most of which appeared to be about google (photos of the olympic site or streetview), but a few little gems did stand out:

1. For the historians and literary types amongst you,  the diaries of Samuel Pepys and George Orwell are being syndicated, one entry a day.
2. The Geologists really seem to be getting it right where nearly everyone else is getting it wrong (shame the map browser doesn’t work on FF3 though). I’m blown away by how forward-thinking this is and wish we could do something similar for other types of data.
3. There’s another really good geographically-themed xkcd comic up. Personally I wish all google maps directions were like that…
4. Finally, if you didn’t catch the announcement about GeoAdminSuite, it looks (at first glance) like a worthy contender in the “organising and visualising your geospatial data” arena.

Two Mondays ago I came into work in the morning to find one of my windows servers no longer booted. The short version  is that all the data was fine, but the windows partition had got itself corrupted. I now have a linux server, and know more about samba and winbind than I ever thought I would need to. No big deal, you might say, but it has been a learning experience for me, and I’m very grateful to my colleagues for their patience whilst I dropped everything else and flailed around in the dark trying to learn the intricacies of samba config from scratch.

I do have one thing to say… if you’re using winbind, remember that it can take at least 20 minutes from startup to work properly. If I’d known that a couple of days ago I’d have posted this much sooner, if you get my drift!

Things that have crossed my path over the last few days that are worth a look:

• Duh everyone has heard about this one already- Radiohead go open source and geospatial. If I liked their music, they’d be my favourite geeky band for sure. I’m certainly going to use this as light-hearted example of fun GIS things in courses.
• Leif finally posts again with a very thought-provoking article on misrepresentation and whether archaeologists should provide support to the military in conflict situations. It’s quite long, but worth hanging on for, and as archaeologists we need to think about this kind of thing if we are to be taken seriously and have any chance of protecting the cultural heritage of areas under conflict.
• Leif (again) and Paul and Tom from Wessex Archaeology finally have their paper on computers in archaeology publically available. Go read!
• There’s also a couple of interesting white papers floating about. Activestate have one that debunks 10 myths about open source for businesses. I think it could be more positive about open source, and in particular the strength of the community and the lack of vendor lock-in, but (let’s be honest here) they are selling support. Finally, Microsoft have a beginners guide to map projection- it’s a nasty aspx link so apologies if it dies. It’s a shame that it’s not available as a pdf (not that you can’t save it as one, of course).

Via the seasite mailing list, this article about the difference between underwater archaeology, salvage, and treasure-hunting really got me thinking.

I started off as a diver, then a marine archaeologist, and often came into contact with the strange point of view that if you find something underwater, like something from a wreck, it’s OK to prise it off and take it home to display proudly on your wall, yet you’d hardly go and break the wing-mirror off someone’s car. A friend became an archaeologist for Odyssey, the controversial marine salvage firm, and was ostracised amongst the academic community for his decision, yet he just wanted to put food on his children’s table, and felt that it was better for Odyssey to have some archaeologists trying to do things right than none at all.

Clearly, the difference between archaeology and treasure hunting or salvage is not clear, and is often quite emotive. This latest article, though, makes me feel even more uneasy about this strange blurring of lines. From what I can tell, treasure-hunters felt it was their right to steal things, even when visited by the police and the coast guard.

I don’t think this happens all that often on land, though we have occasionally had to hire 24 hour security for our sites to stop metal-detectorists coming in and digging things up. And sometimes to stop feral children getting in and setting fire to things. But that’s a different story…

The only conclusion I can come to is that people think it’s OK to do this sort of thing underwater, or at sea, because they don’t think they will be seen or caught. So, people behave themselves only because they think they will be censured by their peers, not because of any inherent sense of right or wrong. How depressing…