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Why Digital Archaeology? A Case Study - Ep 165
292 Plays4 years ago
Archaeologists have been using digital technologies to augment traditional field archaeology for several decades (GPS and mapping mostly). However, as modern technologies continue to enter the archaeological space, most researchers are using these techniques almost as a second thought. The authors of this case study argue for development of a digital strategy that will allow researchers to plan and develop questions that are answered by a suite of techniques.
Links
- Why Digital Archaeology? A Case Study from Monte Albán, Oaxaca (SAA Archaeological Record)
- Archaeology at Monte Albán's Main Plaza (website)
- MADAP on Sketchfab
- The Open Digital Archaeology Textbook (ODATE) on GitHub
- CLSA Webinar: Drone Surveying Best Practices
Transcript
So, transcripts are new from our recording software. It doesn’t get everything right and the transcript is the raw recording with no editing. But, it’s better than nothing and I’m glad we have them now! Let me know what you think in the comments. (get the files from the website directly)
- Segment 1
- Segment 2
- Segment 3
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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- Tee Public Store
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
Episode Introduction and Focus
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 165. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss a case study about planning your digital archaeological strategy. Let's get to it.
00:00:32
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going? It's going pretty good. Yeah, I'm just chilling at home right now, working a bunch of projects because I've got a big project coming up that I'd like to tell you a little bit about. How are you doing?
Location and Anecdotes from the Field
00:00:45
Speaker
Where are you? We are currently in Tucson, Arizona. I'm looking out the front window of my RV right now at a whole bunch of saguaro cactuses. We're literally surrounded. We're right outside the national park, which is not a
00:00:57
Speaker
closed National Park like a lot of them are. You can just drive right through this thing. They have a visitor center where you can go in and pay a fee if you're going to be ethical about it. And I think they've got some camping in other parts of the year and stuff too. But we're actually in a campground that's basically... It's not part of the park. It's in the Tucson Mountain Park it's called. It's more of a county or maybe a state thing. I don't really know. But it's exactly the same as the National Park because I can probably see the National Park.
00:01:23
Speaker
a few hundred feet away. It's not that far. So really cool area though. We've seen coyotes. We've seen the cactuses or cacti, if you will, are just crazy. I was walking out of the car the other day and a piece of cholla, if you've ever come in contact with that got, I didn't realize it, but clipped onto my heel. And then when I moved my right foot past my left ankle,
00:01:46
Speaker
As you walk, it jammed into my ankle and then I had to basically sit down and pull spine by spine as it was already well embedded. This choia spines out of my ankle.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, sounds like you're having a great time. Welcome to the desert. There you go. How was that shovel protesting project that we talked about last time? How'd that go? It went great. It's a CRM project, so I can't talk about it in too much detail, but you help settle my nerves a little bit. I went up there and it was a small crew, just four of us total, including the field director, the field supervisor.
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, what a great bunch of guys. We did some hard work digging a lot of holes in the fields. Some in woods, usually in rose bushes, wild rose bushes, which are my new best worst friend.
00:02:39
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, I don't like them. And we didn't find anything, I think I can say that, because I haven't said where or why or with whom, but it was so much fun though. I've always liked field work. And, you know, and I think you got a sense of that when I was on Nevada with you, I just kind of enjoyed being in the field. And this was same sort of thing, very, very different conditions, very, very different kind of work.
00:03:02
Speaker
But it was fun. It just feels healthy. And then in the evenings, I sit around the guys on the porch and drink some beers and talk archaeology. And they're really, really bright. So we had some interesting discussions about the various kinds of archaeology, archaeology in different parts of the world, differences between academic and CRM archaeology.
Challenges of Fieldwork in Different Terrains
00:03:23
Speaker
I just filled my head every night with different ideas and things I hadn't thought of and new things to learn. And it was just, it was a blast.
00:03:31
Speaker
Nice. Nice. That's really cool. You know, I'm curious if you guys saw any of these. I worked in Vermont one time. That's really my only Northeastern archaeology experience. It was just outside Burlington and then outside Stowe a little bit. And one of the things like the Burlington part, whatever, we were under a transmission line, didn't see much. It was all basically cleared out for access to the transmission line. But then a small contingent of us went out near Stowe and we're basically I have no idea why we were digging where we were digging.
00:04:01
Speaker
But we were traipsing through the woods across property lines and other things. And we would cross, when we were going to little areas where we were shovel testing, we weren't grid shovel testing, we were spot shovel testing. And I'm not, again, I have no idea why we were doing that. But we would cross these stone fences that are sometimes a couple hundred years old. And you worked with us in Nevada. Every time we crossed a road, we had to think, hey, we should record this because it's probably historic. But we didn't even give those stone fences a second thought.
00:04:28
Speaker
We had two of those on the property that we were on, all of them just inside the woods and basically they bounded a drainage and then the fields on either side and we didn't bother recording them. It didn't really matter in so far the scope of the project and I'm totally familiar with those because
00:04:51
Speaker
Every time I go hiking in this area, and like I said before, it's only half an hour north of where I live, that's how all the woods are. They're just littered with old stones because all the woods around here are second growth.
00:05:04
Speaker
Right? So at some point it was farmland and, you know, poor farmer, 100, 150, 200 years ago went with Zoxon and, you know, piled up all the rocks that they could get out. And it's very rocky soil. You know, it's pretty good loam, but it's tons of rocks. I think mostly glacial deposit. I'm not certain. I think you're probably right.
00:05:25
Speaker
of all sorts of different kinds. So we get slate, we get chunks of granite, we get river cobbles, little broken bits of this and that, lots of quartz pieces, just all mixed up. Every shovel has stones in it. Every hole that you dig is going to have a lot of that stuff.
00:05:41
Speaker
And then they're the bigger ones and they're the frost heaves that lift out the bigger and the smaller ones to the surface. So if you want to farm, you got to get those things out of the way. So that's what we have. It's kind of a feature of this part of the Northeast. And I'm not at all surprised that you found the same thing up in Vermont. I mean, it's different up there, but not radically different in terms of when people moved in and what they were doing. People, meaning Europeans farming.
00:06:06
Speaker
as opposed to the populations that were here before. And that's a whole other can of worms. Indeed, indeed. Yeah, I have no idea. I would see one of those things was like, look at this. This is super cool. And they're like, yeah, we'll keep walking, buddy. We're not to the shovel testing area yet. So I'm like, all right. Well, had no idea. Yeah, no, I mean, I ran into two barbed wire lines and we didn't have to even record those. And that's something that we would have in many cases in Nevada have recorded if there were, you know, wooden posts as opposed to metal posts.
00:06:36
Speaker
Actually, I literally ran into one of them.
00:06:40
Speaker
I didn't expect that here, but it was right along one of those stone walls in the woods. The vegetation just reminds me of another really quick story. Working in, I want to say either South Carolina or Georgia, I think of South Carolina, vines and prickly bushes and things are just the name of the game. And if you don't have a machete or something else on you, then you're using like your shovel to basically hack brush when you're trying to walk your line to your next shovel test. And I'll never forget.
00:07:07
Speaker
thinking I wanted to stay on transect. And I went and we had these little box screens, not like the big stand up ones. So we were kind of just little box screens. And I, I hucked the box spring, a box screen up over this series of vines to kind of stay on transect because I had to go way around this. I just couldn't get around this brush. And of course it got stuck like 15 feet up in the air in this brush. And then I was like, ah, son of a, I was trying to pull down the vines to get the screen out. So then I threw my shovel at the screen to try to knock that out. And the shovel got stuck up there.
00:07:37
Speaker
It took me like another 30 minutes just to get them both down. I was like, I'm going to Nevada. Yeah. No, we had lots of that. It was the brush gets really dense and everything, the more dense it is, the more thorns and prickers there are. One thing actually I did want to mention that I really liked about the way that they had is that the GIS team preplotted in collector the locations of the shovel tests.
00:08:04
Speaker
So then we went out with iPads and with the GPS on the iPads, you basically plop yourself on the point. So rather than having to walk a transect, you know, with your compass to sight a line down there and then pace out, you just go until it lights up green and then you tap, add a new layer. They had all the different kinds of points pre-programmed. So once I dug, if it was a positive shovel test or a negative shovel test, I just added the right kind of point and then all the different descriptors.
00:08:33
Speaker
Well, it sounds like that company has a really good digital archaeology strategy. Hey, nice segue. I don't know if they've read this article. My guess is they've been doing that for a long time. And a lot of people could take a page out of their methodology. But that's what we're going to talk about today is an article from the SA archaeological record. And I'll let Paul introduce it because he found it.
00:08:56
Speaker
Okay, so I found it. It showed up in my email inbox, thanks to the SAA. It's in the latest edition of the SAA archaeological record. And the name of the article is Why Digital Archaeology,
The Case for Digital Archaeology
00:09:08
Speaker
a case study from Monte Alban Oaxaca by Mark N. Levine and Alex Ibadillo.
00:09:14
Speaker
And short little read, anybody that has access to this and that listens to our podcast, I think we'll find this interesting. You can blow through it pretty quickly, but it just gives an example, a case study and an argument too. And the argument is what I found the most interesting for how they went about their research design and
00:09:32
Speaker
why they think that digital archaeology is a valid framework. So the first thing that before I even got into the article, just reading the intro, it reminded me of, you're familiar with Odate, right? The open digital archaeology textbook. And so Sean Graham et al., right in their intro, they have a pretty robust argument
00:09:58
Speaker
defense of digital archaeology is its own term. Long-term listeners to this podcast know, you and I say that digital archaeology might be an anachronistic term now because everybody does stuff digitally. But Odate and also this article take a slightly different turn, which is that just because you're doing stuff with computers doesn't make it digital.
00:10:18
Speaker
And that's what we're complaining about, I think. You can't call it digital just because you did part of it in a GIS or you did part of it with a database. Certainly not if you did it with Excel or a word processor because those are just taken for granted at this point. But this article says, hey, if
00:10:38
Speaker
you think about digital all the way through, digital archaeology is still a valid framework for approaching your work. And then they, of course, they illustrate it with what exactly they were doing.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly what they start out saying that most archaeologists, and I don't know what they mean by most or how much research they did on that, but I would probably say in CRM at least, it's probably true that a lot of archaeology projects, there's a research design based around the literature search, the common questions for that area. A lot of times in CRM, the controlling agencies have
00:11:18
Speaker
contexts that have been written for certain areas and you'll read those historical or pre-historical contexts and you'll come up with a research design based on that. There are going to be a lot of questions based around transportation and subsistence and just things like that.
00:11:35
Speaker
And that's typically where the strategizing kind of ends. It's like, okay, let's go dig some holes. Let's go do some survey. Let's go do some whatever. But having an actual strategy around the field work and around the questions that you want to answer that does have a heavy digital component is actually a really good idea because there's certain things that the authors highlight that you may not even have thought about to do.
Pre-Planning Digital Strategies for Fieldwork
00:12:00
Speaker
There's some things we're going to talk about in here that if they hadn't
00:12:03
Speaker
actually pre-planned their digital strategy, especially flying all the way to Mexico, because it doesn't sound like they live there. So they fly all the way to Mexico, they got to bring equipment with them. They wouldn't have known what to bring efficiently. They can't just bring everything. So they wouldn't have known what to bring, how to use it, how to maximize the time that they have there in order to actually answer some of the questions and produce some of the things that they did without coming up with this strategy. Right. Now, a key factor of what their defense of that term, quote unquote, digital archaeology,
00:12:31
Speaker
And what they illustrate in this is that their data collection is all born digitally, right? It's born digital and that just kind of naturally leads them in the kinds of questions they're asking and the kinds of tools they want to use all the way through collection, processing, analysis, and presentation all stay within a digital or digital adjacent realm.
00:12:53
Speaker
which I think is absolutely valid. And I don't fault them for calling it digital archaeology. I don't fault anybody for calling their work digital archaeology. I just think that it deserves a little pushback if you're calling it digital and all you're doing is collecting your data on an iPad in the field. That's the big digital part of it. Yeah, that's born digital. And that's a good use of digital tools, but I don't think it sets you apart anymore. And so what they're trying to do is show that a research design that end to end is digital, that can still be this digital archaeology.
00:13:22
Speaker
Yeah. And one of the links that we have in here came from the article is for the Monte Alban Digital Archaeology Project. There's a website, the MADAP, or however you say that, project. And I understand in a 2021 from an SEO standpoint, putting digital archaeology in the title of your website and probably all over the website, because there's still a lot of people searching the terms digital archaeology when they don't really know what they're looking for. There's too many
00:13:49
Speaker
Technological avenues that you could go down and it's just like what do I even do? I don't know what to type in I don't know what a volumetric study is based on three photogrammetry Well, how would I even know that so I'm gonna type in digital archaeology and see what other people have done So I get that but I I do hope more to our original point of our criticism of the term digital archaeology that we can
00:14:09
Speaker
We can just go to a website called the Monte Alban Archaeology Project and there would be a heavy digital component that is just part of it because we would expect that. Yeah, I think that expectation comes and goes depending on how your data are being generated. If you're dealing with a project that has legacy materials,
00:14:32
Speaker
It can't be born digital, right? It's all on an index cards and field notebooks and such. You can digitize it and then turn it into digital, but it's not going to be born digital. If you're doing excavation, it can only be so digital because you can't excavate digitally yet.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah. So I think that there's a lot of gray here, but again, I like their approach in defense of the use of that term of saying, hey, we're going to do this end to end. And so for that, for me, as opposed to you just want it to be the Monte Alban archaeological project, I don't mind that D, that digital archaeology in there in this particular case, because this particular project is heavily foregrounded with the digital.
00:15:17
Speaker
It is. It is. So let's go ahead. We're going to take a break here. But while we're on break, in case you are at your computer or smartphone and clicking on some of these links, if you click on the link to the article, if you're on a smartphone or a tablet, it may not work. But if you're on a full size computer with a browser,
00:15:36
Speaker
spread your window out just a little bit just in case it's not taken up the full screen because I did not do that when I first was reading this article and they were referencing some figures in the article that I couldn't see and there were seemingly no links for and then when I expanded my browser out a little bit the links on the side appeared and I clicked on the little book shaped link and it opened up the digital magazine
00:15:58
Speaker
version of the SA archaeological record with all the images right where you would expect to see them. So don't forget to do that if you're not seeing the figures that are represented.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, I put a comment to that on our show notes because I was absolutely baffled. I was reading on my iPad and they kept on referencing figures. I'm like, this must be some fault in editing of the archaeological record. And then, you know, when we were talking before recording, you went and pointed out to me, oh, that button on the left, I was like, yeah, I clicked that button on the left a bazillion times. I clicked all the buttons. All I could do is toggle between the table of contents and this reader view of the article that didn't have any images at all. Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:38
Speaker
Is it on my computer? And oh, look at that. There are the images in all your full color glory. Actually, to me, that just highlights one of the slight gotchas with digital in general. And it's not just digital because it can certainly happen in the analog world, but making sure things are obvious and accessible and usable to the end user. I mean, I'm recently tech savvy.
00:17:02
Speaker
I think, and that I didn't figure that out, try it on a different device, blow up the screen, click the buttons again, means that it's not probably as easy as it should be. That's not the fault of the authors of the article at all. It's probably not even really the SAA's fault. It's the fault of this viewer, this online- They're using a third-party reader. ... article reader that they've got that was not done right.
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, and now that I've done that, I can download the PDF, which would have made me so much happier because I would have downloaded the PDF onto my iPad and read it the way I wanted to in the first place. Yeah. There you go. All right. Well, with that note, and by the way, I'm not some tech genius either. I found it accidentally because I clicked on another link and just wanted to see it bigger and went back to the article and oh, hey, what are these buttons doing? So, you know, found it just randomly. All right. Well, with that note,
00:17:55
Speaker
I should end it like a, like an episode of the grand tour and say, well, I'm that great disappointment in this segment and go to segment two back in a minute. Chris Webster here for the archeology podcast network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster that's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
00:18:23
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:19:27
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 165 of the Archaeotech podcast. And we are talking about an article that you can find in our show notes from the SAA archaeological record. And it's all about coming up with your digital archaeological strategy for a project. This is a case study from a Monte Alban project.
00:19:45
Speaker
So we're going to talk about that here in a second. But the authors define, for them, digital archaeology as the methods used to produce, analyze, visualize, or transform digital data. So that's what they're talking about here. Anything that you're using to do one of those things helps you do that. And I want to go back real quick to the name of the website and the whole digital aspect in there.
00:20:11
Speaker
Because I did go through the website quite a bit. They do highlight a lot of the strategies and things that they used. But the end result of all that and the end result of the entire website, just like this whole project, is to learn more about Monte Alban and the questions they were trying to answer about the people and the places that live there. So from that standpoint,
00:20:30
Speaker
I mean, if you really want to be pedantic about it, it's the Digital Anthropology Project. But it really was just the Montelbon Archaeology Project, because it's not about the techniques, it's about the results. And the results say the plaza was used this way for this amount of time, XYZ, it's standard. Those kinds of questions in archaeology are the way that we answer those and what we're looking for. I don't think you're ever going to change, regardless of our technology. But the way we get to those answers is, of course, changing dramatically. And that's what we're talking about.
00:21:00
Speaker
Right, and that's interesting that you're saying the anthropology of it and such. The criticism that gets leveled a lot, and this is actually mentioned in that O-Date introduction.
00:21:13
Speaker
When people talk about digital archaeology is this notion of foregrounding the tools to the point of the tools are more important than whatever you learn from them, whatever questions you ask, whatever answers you can get. The fact that you did it with the
00:21:32
Speaker
3D modeling and beautiful rendering and whatnot is in and of itself enough. Now, it could be if your point is outreach and you want to show people a pretty picture that's going to get them interested in learning more about your site, your project, the culture, the history, whatever. But yeah, that's a trap that we can fall into really easily is just using the whiz-bang toys because they're whiz-bang and they're fun for people like you and me.
00:22:02
Speaker
Yeah. But they are really focused on still examining archaeological questions with what they're doing. The digital tools are being described and being used extensively, but the tools aren't the end result. They aren't really the point even of this article.
00:22:22
Speaker
The fact that they use the tools is a point of the article, but what they were able to ask because of those tools that they use, that's really the point. And so I think that's a fine line to draw then with digital archaeology writ large, you know? You know, so it becomes a continuum again, right? Between us discarding the fact that you use an iPad for data collection as not really being digital archaeology, even though we find it valuable, all the way to the far other end where
00:22:50
Speaker
the digital takes more importance in the archaeology that you're writing about the tools. And mind you, we've discussed certain articles on this podcast in the past that discuss the tools, but that's always in the context of a how-to. Here's what I tried to do, and here's what worked, and here's what didn't. They're saying, we used all these tools, and these are the things that we did with them, but these are the great questions that we could ask archaeologically and anthropologically based off of the fact that we did them with these tools.
00:23:18
Speaker
And the tools are critical to them being able to ask those questions, but not the point of it. Right. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to take away from people writing articles like this because this is how other people learn about all these tools, of course. So I want to make it sound like we're trying to say this is a negative way to do something by any means. But I guess I'm just I'm really looking forward to a future where
00:23:45
Speaker
You know, every project uses some form of GPS, right? And in fact, one of the first things they talk about here was using a total station. I mean, we've been using total stations for in archeology. I mean, total stations been around for a long time, but in archeology, we've probably been using them for what, three decades or more. So, you know, it's old news, right? It's just expected that you're going to use something like that on a project like this, any sort of full scale excavation. I mean, there better be a total station out there or something that can record sub meter points in that level of accuracy. So yeah, do that credit.
00:24:15
Speaker
The Total Station, they just say, we used it for recording microtopography. They didn't say what kind of Total Station, what programs they used to process it. That was all assumed, just like if you were writing something in a word processor, you're not going to say, hey, this was written in Word or this was written, I might say it was written in Latex, but that's because I'm a weirdo.
00:24:36
Speaker
Oh my God. I want to do like a joke article to the archaeological record about the digital archaeology of report writing and be like, well, I used word and I use the thesaurus feature and actually, you know, just like get real technical about it.
00:24:53
Speaker
I use tab stops. That's why I'm better than all the rest of you. That's right. Tabs, not spaces. Get out of here. Rookies. Oh, man. That's right. That's right. Anyway, one of the next things that they mentioned too was actually their drone mapping.
00:25:12
Speaker
That's also almost becoming a little bit normal. You know what I mean? It's falling, drones are starting to fall into the realm of total stations where they don't, they still mentioned they use the DJI Phantom 4 Pro and some of their methodology and things like that because it is important for your strategy because I was happy when they put up some numbers. So they flew a total of 46 flights. I don't know how long they were down there, but 46 flights is actually quite a bit and high altitude at 45 to 60 meters and low altitude at 15 to 25 meters.
00:25:40
Speaker
I don't know if those were split evenly, but that's what they did. And they took over 15,000 photos for a total of 105 gigabytes of data. Now, actually, 15,000 photos. And I was kind of thinking only 105 gigabytes, but the 4K photos of the DJI, that's probably, it's not taking raw photos, but it's taking good enough photos for some pretty high quality photogrammetry.
Drone Mapping in Archaeology
00:26:05
Speaker
And they did mention using ground control points, which is really cool. Those help.
00:26:10
Speaker
anchor your model in real space. You can produce a model without anchor control points, without ground control points. But if you put in ground control points, then they measure those with a total station, and now you can take that model and anchor it in the real world. Otherwise, it's just floating in the ether. But then you can put it in real space, and then you can have real measurements and all that stuff based on that. So I thought doing that stuff was kind of cool. But if this were not an article about a digital archaeological strategy,
00:26:37
Speaker
I'm not certain they would have even mentioned the equipment or their methods. They would have just said, hey, we produced a photogrammetric model about this. And that's how common it's becoming. Yeah. No, actually that point then kind of goes against what I was just saying that they, in this case, they are foregrounding the use of some equipment that is becoming increasingly common.
00:26:54
Speaker
I don't think we mentioned with this article, what they're doing is work started in 2017, and it was carried out to examine the changing role and the meaning of the main plaza at Montelban through time. They had some questions. They had some research questions they wanted to ask, and these are the tools that they went to try to answer that.
00:27:15
Speaker
The other reason why this article caught my attention is because in a couple of weeks, I'm supposed to go to Iraq to go do something very similar to what they're doing. I'm supposed to be going out there to fly a drone to make a new map of a site called Lagash,
00:27:31
Speaker
in southern Iraq in Dikar government. I don't know if you remember from a couple months ago when I was in Nevada with you and we were on the archaeology show and there was an article about a bunch of sites in Dikar. Anyhow, that's down in the south.
00:27:46
Speaker
It's a really large site, around 450 hectares. We've been having these meetings, discussing the equipment. Interestingly enough, the equipment that we're going to be using is also a DJI Phantom 4 Pro, just like they used in this article. We're trying to get a sense of how long it's going to take, how many flights we're going to have to have. This is all good information for me to have to strategize my own work.
00:28:09
Speaker
And one of the things that struck me is that because we're dealing with such a big area in this Iraq project, the initial pass through, the person that ran it through drone deploy was talking about 80 meters, which seems too high for me, but it's a huge area that we got to cover. This particular, the multi album project,
00:28:30
Speaker
is interesting to me in that they're doing these two levels as far as I know because they have two different levels of resolution that they want because they don't just want the topography. What I'm looking at at Lagash is I'm just going to be doing the topography, what the site looks like, and then we can get some good topo, some good contour maps off of that.
00:28:50
Speaker
What they were doing here with this is not just the topographical features, but also in much more detail because it has standing stone architecture. They were doing closer in work, low altitude work around those buildings on the site. Then those buildings then become what they move forward with in some of these later stages of this project, which is really cool.
00:29:16
Speaker
But to your point about this stuff becoming commonplace on so many archaeological projects, in my preparations for going to Iraq, earlier today I was watching a video, a very good one, I had a link as well, put together by a land surveying company, talking to other land surveyors about, hey, do you want to get into drone surveying?
00:29:36
Speaker
Here's what the costs are, here's what the considerations are, here's what you need to know, how you do. They also end up recommending that same DJ Phantom 4 Pro because of its simplicity. But this is from 2018. So in 2018, this person knew enough about doing drone surveying
00:29:57
Speaker
professionally as a land surveyor that he could put together a very well argued, very easy to understand hour long presentation that's up on YouTube now of how to go about it for other land surveyors. So it's not something new. And so you're right, we should be getting over this at this point, even though I'm going to be taken out to do the drone surveying and geez, I would like it to be the high tech whiz bank thing that
00:30:24
Speaker
I've always wanted to be, but it's probably not so high tech, so whiz bang anymore because so many people are doing it. Well, and including in your strategy too, which is something people haven't necessarily had to think about before, except for like logistics from vehicles and lodging and stuff like that standpoint. We always have to think about that for remote archeology projects. But also just looking at the numbers here, which is why I'm glad they put this thing down because people are like, oh, I've got a phantom or the university has a phantom and we can bring one of those out on the project. Yeah.
00:30:54
Speaker
don't bring just one like 32 gig SD card or micro SD card, it probably takes a micro and don't just bring that, bring like 20 of those, right? And then bring something to dump those onto as well because you don't want to go through multiple airport security checkpoints with all of your data on your micro SD cards. That is just a really bad idea.
00:31:15
Speaker
That was one of the things I brought up yesterday in our pre-planning meeting. We need to have, at a minimum, two portable hard drives that we can dump all our images onto nightly and then we'll send them back. We're not all flying in from the same place, so we'll send them on different flights back just in case something happens.
00:31:34
Speaker
Yeah. And I don't know what your guys is, you know, lodging situation is going to be too, but you also have to think about batteries. How many do you have? How many flights can you do a day on the batteries that you have? Can you charge those batteries in the field or do you have to charge them up at night when you're in the, wherever you're staying stuff like that? Oh yeah. We've been having back and forth emails about that. Currently we've got four batteries. I'm arguing for two to four more and basically, you know,
00:32:00
Speaker
Uh, that, that device should get 17 to 20 minutes per battery charge, uh, which basically means, yeah, ideally. So I'm rounding down to 15 minutes. And so that means that an hour flight time per four batteries. And then we can calculate out from there. And then how many days were at that 80 meter elevation that they calculate the other day, that would be eight to 10 days.
00:32:23
Speaker
We have three weeks total, so we're just doing a lot of very basic math here, but it's a balance between time, time in the field, expense, and like you said, can we actually get these things charged? Yes, we have good electricity. We'll be able to get them charged, but if we're going to stay on schedule, it means that we got to get all four to eight batteries charged fully every day because we're going to use them up fully every day. That's part of the whole process.
00:32:50
Speaker
Well, the other things you have to take into concern with battery life is the frequency with which you're taking photos, which also brings into concern the type of microSD card as well. I found this out the hard way. When I had my DJI Inspire Pro, it was my first real high-quality drone with a 4K camera on it. I popped just like a microSD card in there, and it almost wouldn't take the photos in the highest resolution because the card wasn't writing fast enough.
00:33:18
Speaker
for the machine to do it. I was doing some photogrammetry and I had set it up to take pictures on an interval that was too fast for the card to write. Keeping that in mind, a higher altitude for this larger survey is actually a pretty good
00:33:36
Speaker
thing for you because you can take fewer pictures at a higher altitude at a longer interval because you're just looking for an overlap and the higher you are, the bigger your field of view, so fewer pictures. And unless you're going 30 miles an hour, then you're going to be taking pictures pretty fast, but you're probably not. So the two other big factors, as long as you've got a good high right speed SD card,
00:33:56
Speaker
is wind. Wind will take down a drone battery like nothing because sure that looks like a rock solid photo but it is working hard to stay steady. And then the frequency with which you're taking photos because that also you're more than likely taking pretty high resolution photos and that burns a lot of power. So to be honest I'd probably predict about 10 minutes per battery just to be on the safe side and if you get an hour call yourself lucky you know what I mean.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah. Cause you're, you're also going to have the out and back time too. So you're going to, you're going to program drone deploy and your, your last transect battery life wise may end, you know, a long ways away from you. And then the drone's got to come back doing nothing dead walking, if you will, dead flying all the way back to you. And that battery life has to be taken into account. That could be a minute, you know, when you're looking at 10 to 15 minutes, that's a, you know, 10 to 10% of your battery.
00:34:47
Speaker
Oh, and don't forget the drones, they ascend faster than the decent ended up to 80 meters is going to take me 20 seconds, half a minute, maybe getting it back down. It's going to take me two minutes at least on the battery down.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, no, I mean, I could just shut the rotors off and I can get down within a couple of seconds, but just just get a big net out there. Yeah. I'll just put it over and try to catch it. Nice. It's not like it's a big drone or anything that's going to hurt like hell.
00:35:20
Speaker
Oh, man. Yeah. All right. Well, that's about it for this segment. Let's come back on the other side and wrap up this article. This has really spawned some good discussion. And that's the whole point of an article like this, because people don't think about these really minute details unless they've really had experience with it. So I'm glad we're talking about this. Let's come back on the other side and finish this up. Back in a minute.
00:35:43
Speaker
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00:36:03
Speaker
Welcome back to the final segment of episode 165 of the archaeotech podcast. And we are wrapping up this discussion on developing your own digital archaeological strategy based on the article linked in the show notes from the SA archaeological record of, well, what, August or September, I think September of 2021 just came out. Yep, September 21, volume 21, number four.
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, and something I wanted to mention, because Paul's going to, if you look at the show notes, there's a link to that video Paul was talking about with the survey company and some things to consider when you're doing these drone surveys, is archaeology is a little late to the game with some technologies. There's very few things that are being developed in-house. Now, maybe some strategies or techniques using certain technologies are being developed by archaeologists because they haven't been used in this way. That is 100% valid. But basic use and function of some of these things
00:36:54
Speaker
Other industries have been doing this for a lot longer than archaeologists have. If you're curious about these things, just Google it. I hate to say that, but Google it and find the videos, find other industries. It might not say archaeology on it, but that's probably for the best because these people know what they're doing. They've worked out all the kinks and they know the best practices.
00:37:15
Speaker
Of course, you got to put your archeological lens on it if they're saying, if it's a surveying company and they're like, fly it a thousand feet over the ground because all you care about is where the roads and the fence lines. Think about what you can see as an archeologist. Maybe that's true on a Nevada project. If all you're doing is a road survey, yeah, a thousand feet is probably acceptable.
00:37:35
Speaker
Think about what you're trying to see. This Monte Alban project is a really good example of that. Like you said, you don't need to fly that low in Iraq because you're not looking for minute details in the stone and rocks and things like that, like these guys are at Monte Alban. That's why they're flying such a low altitude pass.
00:37:53
Speaker
Yeah, no, back to that surveying video. One of the things that they do mention, it comes up obliquely in the video, but it definitely comes out in the Q&A at the end of the webinar, is that they use multiple systems. They're using the drones because most of the work that you do as a land surveyor can actually be done much more quickly and efficiently that way.
00:38:15
Speaker
But there's certain detail work, things around where power lines run or where drains or gutters run. You could do that photogrammetrically, but you can do it much more accurately and in some ways faster.
00:38:32
Speaker
with your total station. Then they combine those things at the end. I just like that because we do have a tendency to get stuck in, this is the best tool rather than this is the most appropriate tool for this particular job or this particular part of the job. Seeing that land surveying compared to archeology is a much bigger industry in the US at least and probably worldwide.
00:38:59
Speaker
that they are dealing with their own knowledge and their own expectations and time constraints that aren't unlike what we have in archaeology to get things done, to have produceables at the end. It was nice to see that other people from a different field thinking the same sort of ways. Like you said, you have to put the archaeological lens onto it, but geez, there's a lot that you can learn by looking outside of just archaeology.
Exploring Drone Technologies
00:39:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:39:24
Speaker
Yeah, you know, this isn't a drone episode, although I feel like it's one of our favorite topics. Kind of almost turned into one. I know. But one thing I was thinking about, especially for the RAC project, I don't know if you guys are doing this level of survey, but I was thinking of this survey video and I haven't seen it yet, but when you're doing a big land survey and you're looking for either overall topography or really big features, you know, you're not looking for the minute detailed stuff yet at this level.
00:39:51
Speaker
Sometimes fixed wing is actually the way to go because fixed wing is faster, more battery efficient. It's not trying to center itself and write itself with the wind. Still has stabilizers on their cameras, but it's just, it'll fly at higher altitudes at a faster speed with only one propeller versus four that are trying to maintain stability at all times. And you can just get a lot more
00:40:14
Speaker
time and distance out of the battery and still get the same quality of photographs. Now, you're never going to fly fixed wing at 20 meters. I guess you could if you're in a desert environment, but people don't generally do that because you're too close to the ground for that kind of speed. I don't think cameras and cards that are typically available in those types of machines can handle that kind of speed that close to the ground and not have any blurring effects. So even at a really high shutter speed.
00:40:39
Speaker
I can tell you're an aviation guy because they do talk about that and those are the exact things that they say. Generally, the fixed wind drones are more expensive. There's some concerns about the cameras and the fact that you don't have a gimbal in the same way that you do quadcopter. But if you need to cover a large tract of land in less detail, they may be a very good option. But again, like you just said, you can't fly too close to the ground because you get motion blur. You got to be
00:41:09
Speaker
be up high. So yeah, in our case, Lagash is some 450 hectares roughly. So a thousand acres, that's a big site. A fixed wing might actually be better, especially considering that we're plotting out 80 meter elevation to fly. A fixed wing might be a better choice. Problem is we don't have one.
00:41:32
Speaker
I mean, it comes down to access, right? They are way more expensive. And especially for one that can handle wind, you can buy cheaper ones with cheaper cameras and smaller engines, but they're made out of foam, and a five mile an hour wind will destroy them. So just like lighter drones, right? And there's another complexity, too. Even if you do buy a $10,000 fixed-wing drone with a high-speed camera on it,
00:41:55
Speaker
you might be wondering, how am I going to fly this thing? Because flying a drone is relatively easy. When you let go of the sticks, it just hovers. And you just have to learn the controls and figure it out. And you can get used to that. And it's a lot more forgiving when it comes to mistakes. And there's really good software out there to actually control the drone. So you can just put in the flight path and say, go. And it just does the whole thing for you, which is obviously nobody in their right mind would do a manual photogrammetric survey. You would just take way too many photos or not enough in certain areas and get it all wrong.
00:42:25
Speaker
So oh yeah, it would be terrible. But for fixed wing, they also have the same thing. The higher end ones, I think Trimble, is it Trimble? I think Trimble actually makes one, or at least they highlight one that has some Trimble geospatial stuff inside of it. That will actually fly a course for you. You might have to do some, like they usually hand launch with a takeoff and then you just hit go and the engine starts up and it takes off and flies its own course. And then usually they just glide back with no landing gear onto the ground.
00:42:53
Speaker
And that's pretty much it. And the propellers are designed to fold back and not get destroyed. And they're really good these days. So don't think the flying skills are any more rigorous when flying a fixed wing, especially if you've got good software to control it. If you don't have software, yeah, they're much more difficult to fly. You have to know how to fly a plane, to be honest, and understand those mechanics. But if you don't have the software, it's like the old radio control planes that you and I cut off teeth on.
00:43:19
Speaker
Yeah. And you'll, you'll cut a lot more than that if you know how to fly it. Especially if you're using one of the old internal combustion engines and you got to start it with the chicken stick or something.
00:43:33
Speaker
Yeah. My grandpa had this old piece of like thick rubber to start his day. He was really into model airplanes, built all his own planes and built his own radios even. And just like was crazy with it. And he, for the longest time, I don't remember a time when he didn't have this, but he was missing a piece of his index finger, just like a little bit of it, because he got caught up in a prop that started when he didn't think it was going to, he was going into another strike and it took off the end of his finger. Yeah. So I think if you go to an RC airfield, you're going to find
00:44:00
Speaker
way more not 10-fingered people or not in like nine and three quarters. All the old timers, they were using gas engines and seven electric, right? Oh, man. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the last half of the segment, some of the other stuff that they did with the 3D data that they were collecting. Because a lot of the rest of what they did was actually produced from the combination of the total station, the drone data,
00:44:27
Speaker
And probably, I would imagine, a lot of other photographs that they didn't really mention. Again, the technology that's not mentioned, I'm sure they had a digital SLR out there and took a crap ton of photographs. But they just didn't mention that, right? And why would they?
00:44:42
Speaker
Sure, it's probably an off angle photo. It's probably angled a little bit and then they fly over all these passes to get the sides of things and we put it all together, it comes together. But sometimes you might have to fill in with other stuff and that's one of the things that they did. I hadn't really seen this term too many times but they said they created the 3D model and then they were
00:45:02
Speaker
filling in the gaps of the features and the structures to make them, quote, watertight. So there's different lighting techniques you can use in the software to say, are there actually any holes in my model? Like actual holes in your model where there's no data. And then they'd see if they had the data for that from another photograph or something like that. And then when they did that, they did what they call a volumetric study using
00:45:25
Speaker
the literal volume of the features and then comparing that with past studies to find how the sizes and shapes of these things have changed through time, which I thought was really cool.
00:45:37
Speaker
Yeah, right. Just as a side note, that watertight, I've seen that term used in 3D modeling and in 3D printing. And it basically means you don't have any gaps. That's what we're talking about with holes that you fill them in. And usually when you have some area that you haven't surveyed or some area that the camera couldn't see or the sensors or whatever kind couldn't see, you can use your own brain to figure it out. And I've had to deal with that with like Landsats or
00:46:03
Speaker
SRTM Dems trying to map stuff on Earth from satellite photography, satellite imagery, where you've got a spot that for whatever reason
00:46:14
Speaker
maybe it's too vertical. That's a good reason. You have that a lot. There's no data for it. And so instead of going down to zero or null, you say, no, it's actually halfway between this side and that side, and you fill it in. And then that kind of work gets done in things like Blender a lot. But then they're doing these. So this actually gets to the point of them doing the two different elevations.
00:46:37
Speaker
If my supposition is they're doing those low elevations and all those oblique shots, it was because of the architecture. They're doing that to fill in and make highly detailed architectural models, which is what you said for volumetric study amongst a few other display methods that I thought were really cool that they talked about. Again, nothing earth shattering, nothing that you haven't seen before, but a good, robust argument for the end-to-end digitalness of their workflow.
00:47:07
Speaker
Yeah, and two of those other studies, too, remind me a lot of a relatively common thing in archaeology using GIS, which is a viewshed analysis, basically creating a viewpoint somewhere on your map and then having the map shade in. What can't you see if you're standing right here topographically? You're on this point. What's invisible to you? And we use that a lot for
00:47:33
Speaker
historic and prehistoric features and structures where, you know, is the thing that we're building over here going to be in view of this thing? And does that view, if so, negatively impact the character of it or something like that or the setting or the feeling, you know, one of those typical National Register NEPA qualifications?
00:47:51
Speaker
That's interesting. You're using it in the CRM context to find out what impact. Say you have a sacred site, is that radio tower going to be visible from sacred site? Is that going to negatively impact the sacredness of that site? I've used it and seen it used in more purely archaeological studies. Can you see this hill fort from that hill fort?
00:48:15
Speaker
If invaders are coming across the field, can these two hill forts be in communication, light flares or whatever, to indicate that something's afoot? So yeah, but anyhow, the inner visibility gets used a lot of different ways in view sheds, get used a lot of different ways in archaeology, CRM and academic. Again, like I said, it's not something new, but they use it as part of this and they used it because they had data that was amenable to it.
00:48:40
Speaker
Well, and I feel like the new aspect of this, new-ish anyway, is you often think of those visibility and viewshed analyses on a larger scale. Like you said, is this hill forward visible from that hill forward kind of thing? Whereas when you get down to the smaller scale, the more micro scale versus the macro scale, GIS becomes
00:49:00
Speaker
I would say more difficult to use. Not that it's incapable of doing it, but I would say more difficult because we often haven't collected the data to that level of resolution to be able to do that. But when you start producing these photogrammetric models and these 3D models that they mentioned this future things that they're doing, they're working with some other companies to actually produce virtual reality models from the stuff that they've created.
00:49:23
Speaker
to, I mean, literally step into these models. And they were able to do this intervisibility study in the RQ acoustical study without stepping into the model, but they actually can step into it in some cases and literally stand on a platform and say, what can I see from here? And then do an acoustical study and do the same thing. What does it sound like? How would sound waves propagate around this area if I'm standing here versus 10 feet away?
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, right. And that's interesting, actually, that you mentioned. Their indivisibility isn't between this plaza and another site in the valley. They're talking about indivisibility within the plaza, which then allows you to ask certain interesting questions about the use of that space, particularly the ritual use of that space.
00:50:07
Speaker
you know, I know you've never been to church, but for anybody that's ever been to church, where you sit in the building affects how you can see and hear what the priest is saying. And that kind of an understanding of the use of the space and how vision is affected by the physical space and the buildings in this case,
00:50:31
Speaker
or pillars or whatever you've got going on in the church. And then also the acoustical properties of the area really affects how people experience that. And that gets us back to the anthropological question that what we mostly care about is how would people in the past have experienced this? What was their role there? Why were they there? What were they doing there? How would they have
00:50:55
Speaker
been part of whatever was going on there. And so they are actually using this then. They don't actually go into detail in the article about any kinds of results they find from this, but they do say, hey, we're using it for these purposes, intervisibility and archaeocoustics, which is again, cool. And again, also only possible because they've got good data that started and was controlled and processed every step of the way digitally.
00:51:23
Speaker
strong argument in favor of maintaining that term digital archaeology. Absolutely. So I love the discussions this has put together here. And one of the last things that they actually mentioned almost as an, I feel like it was almost as an afterthought again in the article was the 3D printing, which is itself becoming more and more common in archaeology.
Innovations in Archaeological Education
00:51:46
Speaker
But
00:51:47
Speaker
When it comes down to actual usability of 3D models like this, unless you've got a really big 3D printer producing this plaza would be either really small or lots of pieces you got to put together. Unless you've got, like I said, a really big 3D printer. And then they work at a university. There might be one that will do a one foot or two foot cube 3D print, which would be pretty big. But that being said, even if you're putting together smaller models or you're putting together pieces to actually construct this thing and glue it together,
00:52:16
Speaker
Imagine when you're back in university and somebody's telling you about Monte Alban and you've got a slide up on the screen or a movie or even you're watching or something that you're seeing, that's one thing. And kids are on their smartphones and they're falling asleep and they're just not paying attention. But put a model in front of them and say, look at this and touch it, feel it, pick it up, pick up the temple.
00:52:37
Speaker
and see what it does and then move it around and let's explore the different configurations that may have been possible and look how they did it. I don't know, the teaching ability and the excitability of getting people excited about stuff like that is huge, I think, with 3D printing. Now that I can see the pictures,
00:52:58
Speaker
They do have some images of the 3D printer, which looks to be a fairly large one, but it's a regular, you know, extruded plastic. Like, you know, you can buy, like, well, I've got sitting on my desk only larger than this one. That is a big one. And what I'm seeing here just reminds me of, you know, you've been to places where you see like a reconstruction of the city, right? Laid out in front of you, like the famous one for Rome.
00:53:24
Speaker
Right. Or you've seen model train sets and there's something that's just really engaging about them. Even though the model train set is a very old tech, you stand there and you look at it and you just get absorbed into it. So I see that this has a
00:53:40
Speaker
teaching and or engagement tool is really strong, or potentially very strong, because just looking at the photographs of this, I kind of want to, like you were saying, pick up and hold and handle and turn around these things. I don't know if you remember, we had Alexey Vranic a couple years ago, and he was talking about doing this with a building for Tiwanaku.
00:54:03
Speaker
And his 3D printing was using a different material. It wasn't the extruded plastic. And that was part of the process was using a different material to try to get the sense of how the blocks fit together and how the building actually looked because they'd been totally dismantled or almost totally dismantled.
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah. But I definitely see that tactile sense. Really, for me, I'm a very tactile person. When I see these photographs I've got in the article, that excites me. And before we run way too long, let's just mention briefly that they also say they use the 3D models, not just
00:54:36
Speaker
for making 3D prints, but also for making 3D models that they posted up on Sketchfab annotated in some case, bilingually in English and Spanish, so that you as the viewer can go in and explore it on your computer at your own leisure. You don't actually have to go and hold or print out these 3D objects, which again is something that is only possible in this whole digital workflow that they have.
00:55:03
Speaker
But then provides additional avenues for exploration and education, and I'm all about that. That is really kind of very cool, and I'm glad that they did that. Yeah, I like the Sketchfab stuff so much. I pulled it out of the article and dropped it in the show notes, so it's really cool. Yeah, really neat. If you've never even used Sketchfab, man, you can just manipulate things, and they do have it really well annotated like Paul said, and it's just...
Global Impact of Digital Archaeology
00:55:26
Speaker
It's really well done. It's a good example between the website and all the links and resources they have of how to share this kind of thing. How to get it out there and not just keep it in your dissertation or your article or this article or things that are inaccessible to people. Sure, they've probably written
00:55:48
Speaker
dozens of scholarly articles about this stuff that we don't have access to because they're internals that we can't read. That's for their professional reasons. That's for their own academic careers, of course, but also professional reasons to put that stuff out. But then they've also put all this other stuff out for anyone in the world to see. And I really can respect that about a project. And that's one of the other big things that digital archaeology, for lack of a better way to say it,
00:56:15
Speaker
provides is the ability to relatively easily share this stuff with a wider audience that, you know, maybe homebound, maybe, you know, COVID bound in their own country and can't get to anywhere. And, you know, who knows? So this is a really good example of that. No, I agree wholeheartedly. And that that outreach that this digital process enables, facilitates, I think is a really strong selling point. Yeah.
00:56:42
Speaker
All right, well with that, we will end this, what we thought was going to be a shorter recording, this really long recording.
00:56:50
Speaker
Hope you enjoyed it. I know. I enjoyed it. I hope everybody else did, too. It was a really fun discussion. Yeah. So anyway, as usual, the links are in the show notes. You can find the article in the show notes. And hopefully, you've got access to it. If not, you have access to all the resources they put out. So don't feel sad about not being able to see the article. Just take a look at their website, Sketchfab, and some of the other stuff. So you'll get a pretty good idea of what they did. And with that, we'll see you next time. Thanks, Paul. Yeah, thank you. Take care.
00:57:24
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:57:49
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:58:17
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.