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Integrating Aerial and Underwater Data for Archaeology - Ep 103
200 Plays6 years ago
In a recent book chapter, linked below, the integration of underwater and terrestrial archaeology was discussed. It got Chris and Paul thinking about those two spaces and how they are linked in the archaeological record. When seas fluctuate sites are buried and revealed and thinking about them together can help archaeologists interpret the past.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Context
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello, and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, episode number 103. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we talk about underwater 3D data and the maritime cultural landscape. Let's get to it. All right, welcome to the show, everybody. Welcome, Paul. How you doing? Doing pretty good
Temporal Disconnect in Recording
00:00:27
Speaker
today, Chris. How you doing?
00:00:28
Speaker
Good, good. It's such a weird feeling to be so far ahead on this show. Just so everybody knows we're recording this before the SAAs. In fact, it's like mid-March. And if you're listening to this in real time, it came out in May. So we're a little bit temporally displaced from the podcast right now, which is unusual for us. But I just wanted to, we're going to talk about some really cool maritime archeology here in a second. But before we do that, it's not very often we get immediate feedback from
Feedback and Features of Clone App
00:00:53
Speaker
something. And I'll let Paul introduce that and then introduce the email that we got. So take it away, Paul.
00:00:58
Speaker
Okay, immediate feedback. I can't imagine anything more immediate than this. I go about my daily routine when I get up in the morning, I walk the dog, I put away some dishes, I read the news, and I check my email and there's an email commenting about the after the day segment that we did a few episodes back on a
00:01:17
Speaker
on an app that I reviewed called Clone, Q-U-L-O-N-E. I got this response email about the review from the people who make Clone before my podcasting app even popped up to say that that morning's episode of our podcast had come out. So either they're avid listeners of our podcast, in which case, great, or else they've got some really cool bot that's out there finding references to their product and also kind of cool.
00:01:44
Speaker
Anyhow, I'm just going to read the content of this email really quickly because it answers a couple of the questions we brought up in that app of the day segment.
00:02:00
Speaker
One, clone doesn't require an internet connection, so it's a very good option for scanning artifacts on site. Well, that was a question that you had, Chris, whether or not it needed an internet connection, and there we go. Perfect answer. Two, and this was in response to problems I was having using it, minor problems, but good answer, it says number two.
00:02:19
Speaker
When you get spikes or cones on your models, you have three options. A, use the new vertical back mat. You can access it in the get mat option. If you recall from the review, I said the first thing that you do is you print out a map, a checkerboard, and then you place the object on top of it. Well, the vertical one stands 90 degree angle right behind the object, and then you can use that in conjunction with the one that's laid under the object to help reduce these kinds of spikes and to get a better quality scan.
00:02:46
Speaker
That was something I didn't notice. It says new vertical back mat, so I don't know if it was part of the product when I reviewed it or if I just failed to notice that that was an option. Option B is you can merge two scans from different poses. This is intriguing to me. I wonder how many different poses we can do. I haven't had the chance to play with this yet to really see how good of a model I can get by scanning things from multiple orientations.
00:03:10
Speaker
They clearly are thinking about how one might use their product. C is use the flattened top as you did, which is what I used with very good success in one object that I scanned and mediocre success on another one. The third point they make, they say, clone is optimized for archaeological artifacts, especially when the hybrid scan is set to on. Take a look at these examples and we'll put the examples in the show notes here, the links they gave us, but they've got a couple of YouTube links and Sketchfab.
00:03:39
Speaker
and they rounded out like, please let us know if you have any questions and thank you again for helping spread the word. Well, we're glad to and I'm really glad that they have this focus on archaeology.
Clone App's Educational and Archaeological Potential
00:03:50
Speaker
So I'd mentioned when I was reviewing the app that there was a pop-up that said, hey, we have volume purchasing for schools, for example, which I thought was really interesting because I've never seen a pop-up ad in a
00:04:01
Speaker
in any product I've used for volume purchasing. It's something that's very important to us at school where I work, but it's not something I've normally seen pushed. So I thought that showed some good forethought on their part. Well, SNS's email, which showed that they clearly listened to what we had to say about the product and directly answered a few of our questions, shows
00:04:23
Speaker
great forethought and the fact that they use it for archaeology and that they have legitimate examples. They actually have an example of an archaeological project that clone has been used on. It really intrigues me. I would like to have some representative from the company talk to us about that product or maybe an archaeologist that used it because
00:04:45
Speaker
They seem to, from my perspective, be really thinking deeply about how this product can be used productively in educational and scientific environments. And again, it was pretty easy to use and with minimal effort on my part, I got decent scans. So I'm sure that with a few other things like maybe this back mat or maybe merging different scans as they suggest, I can get much better outcome than the okay outcome I got the first time through.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah. And did you remind me, did you email them to see if they come on the show and did they respond to that? I did email them, but I just have the general email info. So I've got to dig in a little more deeply because I really would like somebody from the company to come on and talk about it. I think that could be an interesting episode because again, they, they use it specifically for archeology and, uh, and have that as one of their, uh, their markets in mind, uh, for end users. And I think that's, that's great.
00:05:44
Speaker
Well, if they don't ever respond to the email, maybe we'll just mention it in our show notes again, because they clearly pay attention to that. I doubt they listen to the podcast. If that bot is there, picking it up, they'll call us, right? Please. I know. I doubt they listen to the podcast regularly, but they've got some bot that's mining the internet for when they're linked back to, and we linked them in the show notes. Or there are services out there that will look for mentions, and since clone is spelled so uniquely, Q-L-O-N-E, that's a pretty easy word to search for.
00:06:13
Speaker
So they probably found it that way. But then to their credit, like you said, they must have listened to the show because very specific things were mentioned in the email, which is, again, admirable of them to be paying attention to that.
Maritime Archaeology and 3D Data Integration
00:06:24
Speaker
Well, that brings up something that we discussed a little bit about the App of the Day segment when we had our 100th episode recently and how we like to have it not just be strictly tech, but also the human side of tech. And so here, if they did use a bot and found
00:06:42
Speaker
and found mention to their product on our podcast. Even if they'd never listened to the podcast and know of its existence, they did listen to their app of the day segment and they heard and they responded. So that was a nice fusion of tech and human element and a very nicely, very clearly written email to us that got us both pretty happy that they sent to us. And that's why we're mentioning it again.
00:07:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that was great. Let's get on to our topic of the day, which is basically maritime technology. I think I saw this article linked somewhere online. Somebody shared it, and then I went and took a look at its open source. We're going to link to this in the show notes. But the name of the article is Integrating Aerial
00:07:26
Speaker
and Underwater Data for Archaeology, Digital Maritime Landscapes in 3D. It's by Jonathan Benjamin and others. It's actually not an article, but it's a book chapter from an edited volume called 3D Recording and Interpretation for Maritime Archaeology from the Coastal Research Library, number 31.
00:07:45
Speaker
like an edited journal maybe or something. I'm not exactly sure what that is, but it's 2019. Just came out. Again, we'll definitely link to this in the show notes. And shout outs for them for putting it out as an open access freely downloadable PDF. That's huge, I think.
00:08:03
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I like that it's split up into these, into the specific chapters. And that's all I downloaded was this chapter, but you can go download the entire book if you want and, and check it out. So, uh, that's pretty cool. Um, all right. So one of the things that, uh, I really like about this and, and I guess before I get into that, my takeaway from this entire article, what it was, it was almost a summary of 3d reconstruction techniques, so to speak, or things that add to a 3d reconstruction of a site. It was a summary of.
00:08:33
Speaker
of all the things that were available and then how you can use these things to really bring it all together into a digital maritime landscape. I've never really thought too deeply about underwater archaeology. I've interviewed underwater archaeologists before. I've talked about it before, but this article definitely brought some stuff up for me that I hadn't actually considered.
00:08:53
Speaker
and some ways that they think about under archaeology and that you have to think about sites. And it's stuff that I hadn't even thought of. And this is about bringing all those data together, not just aerial, but underwater data and really painting that picture.
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking about it. I'm glad that you say that you don't pay too much attention to underwater archaeology. Neither do I. I see it, you know, it gets highlighted, especially like on National Geographic and things as being really whiz-bang way cool. But the barriers to entry to underwater archaeology as opposed to terrestrial archaeology seem much, much higher. Training a potential for physical harm, you know, getting the bends or whatever.
00:09:37
Speaker
the very different methodologies that have to be used because of the submerged artifacts and because of the expensive equipment that has to be brought to bear. It's something that I professionally have never really thought about a whole lot. And it feels almost tangential to the kinds of terrestrial archaeology that I'm used to. So it's interesting that you said that you also don't pay a whole lot of attention.
00:10:03
Speaker
But in reading this article, there were a lot of things, just like with you, that sparked ideas, interests, especially around how one defines a site.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah. And I think, you know, instead of really going through this article piece by piece because we don't have any of the authors on, we just kind of just kind of found this a few days ago and we decided to talk about it. So, you know, we can't, you know, with those disclaimers, we can't really discuss in detail the technology and things like that that they're talking about here. But what I would like to bring up to our listeners, because it was brought up in my attention from reading the article, is really defining what the heck we're talking about here. Because you think of
00:10:38
Speaker
They call this digital maritime landscapes and they said underwater data for archaeology in the title. I think what a lot of us think of underwater archaeology, we think of one of two things. We think of shipwrecks and we think of buried coastal sites. Those are the two things I think about.
00:10:56
Speaker
What they're bringing up here is not, okay, first if you just take those two things, shipwrecks and buried archeological sites, very different sites because those ships, yeah, they were either destroyed or fell in place, like maybe they deteriorated or something like that after a neglect. But a lot of times they were destroyed or burned by fire or maybe there's some sort of conflict. Either way they sunk and they ended up on the bottom of some body of water.
00:11:20
Speaker
And then at that point in time, the site formation process, he started to take over. And as the ship deteriorated and currents happened and more soil was laid down, things like that, animals came in, fish, other things.
00:11:35
Speaker
that's how this site was developed. But other sites, buried coastal sites that were once above the water, or underwater coastal sites, I should say, that were once above the water, they went through their own set of site formation practices when they were constructed, when they were used by the people that did that, and then sat for who knows how long before eventually being covered by water and then affected by the water environment. So those are two
00:11:58
Speaker
Very different things, but I think the third component to this that I had never really considered was when you're talking about a digital maritime landscape.
00:12:07
Speaker
One thing he says that a lot of times, or one thing they say in the article here is, and they quote Westerdahl, one of the more cited resources in here, as talking about the landscape, the physical landscape where maritime archeology takes place. So you might have, let's say a boat that was constructed right there, but it for some reason failed and is now underwater there. Well, that boat is an archeological site, but all the wood and the things used to construct that boat were taken from places around the nearby area, theoretically.
00:12:36
Speaker
So trees were cut down, other things happened. People were constructing this boat partially on land and then partially on the water probably. And the settlement that took place to be able to do that, the people lived and ate and all the things related to that, that's all part of the maritime archaeological landscape. And I don't know why we keep separating underwater sites and not underwater sites, above ground sites.
00:13:00
Speaker
I don't know why we separate those when they're in a coastal environment, because they're very much tied to each other. And it's just not something I'd really put a lot of thought into before.
3D Techniques and Applications in Archaeology
00:13:07
Speaker
Well, and these are a lot of the things that I started thinking about upon reading the article. They not only mentioned sites that were buried after the last, excuse me, submerged after. You see, I can't even get away from the terminology I'm used to thinking of in terms of terrestrial archaeology.
00:13:27
Speaker
that were submerged after the last ice age, but they talk about things like there's an example of a shipwreck site or abandoned ship, perhaps, boat, that's in a tidal area, right? So it's partially exposed part of the time, partially submerged part of the time. And I think about that, you know, we've vacationed up in Cape Cod a number of times. If you go around like Wellfleet and thereabouts, you have a lot of
00:13:55
Speaker
old bits of piers and things that are sticking out into the mud flats. And those mud flats get submerged part of the day and then they're exposed part of the day. And so this kind of liminal zone between being terrestrial and being aquatic doesn't even have to be a one-way trip like these old sites that got fully submerged. It can also be something that's an ongoing part of the existence of the site as it's used day to day. But when we make our maps of sites, I know I have in
00:14:23
Speaker
If they're near water, you tend to, you know, that's the edge. Inland might extend as far as your shirt scatters go, right? But when you get to that water's edge, that's the edge of the site. And we know that it's not, but I think that maritime archaeologists know that it's not much more intensely and innately and with much greater subtlety than we landlovers think about that edge of the site.
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the nice thing about this article is they first spend a little time defining that, defining that boundary and how some of these 3D reconstructive techniques can start to eliminate that boundary and how we can use these different techniques to basically bring all this together. And a lot of that is related to photogrammetry. So photogrammetry can be used underwater, it can be used above ground, and then it can be used to bring all this stuff together. But not just that, but what they call bathymetry, sonar,
00:15:19
Speaker
underwater, lidar, things like that. And we can use all these concepts to just bring this entire model together, basically eliminate the water, eliminate the vegetation on land and presumably eliminate the vegetation under the water. But I'm not exactly sure about that. And then come in all at once here and bring this into one big model where you can add and remove the water, but then see how the landscape was affected and how the landscape was impacted by the cultural things that were taking place on this land.
00:15:49
Speaker
Let's take a break real quick. And when we come back, we'll dive a little bit deeper into some of these things. And we'll probably have to reignite our drone drinking game. So back in a second.
00:16:04
Speaker
Hey everyone, Chris Webster here from the Archeology Podcast Network to talk about Team Black. If you are a professional subscriber to the Archeology Podcast Network at arcpodnet.com forward slash members, then you get full access to Team Black's videos for free. They're on a special page on the EPN. You don't have to go to our Patreon account.
00:16:21
Speaker
However, if you just want the videos, you don't care about the archaeology podcast network, which is fine. I'm okay with that. Then head on over to patreon.com forward slash team black. I've got a lot more videos going up there this week. If you're hearing this in middle of April and a whole bunch of stuff. So there's a, there's a lot of.
00:16:40
Speaker
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00:17:06
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to episode 103 of the architect podcast. And we are talking about maritime archeology and maritime cultural landscapes.
Cultural Landscapes in Archaeology
00:17:15
Speaker
MCL is a acronym they use throughout the, uh, throughout the article here. And which I really love thinking about cultural landscapes has really been, I want to say new, a new concept in archeology, only relative to the fact that archeology has been around for
00:17:31
Speaker
I mean, depending on who you talk to, probably 120, 30 years as a real thing to do. And it's only been, honestly, in the last probably few decades that we've really been starting to talk about landscapes in archaeology and not just the sites, but what's going on around the site, what's going on to help create this and do this idea. And this person, Westerdahl, who I don't know more about him, but
00:17:55
Speaker
He's apparently huge in maritime archaeology, and he wrote this paper in 1992 that pretty much changed everything where he said, listen, we need to be thinking about stuff outside the water, too. You know that, right? That's basically what he said. And go from there. So I did mention before the break that we were going to get the drinking game on, so I hope you've got your beverage of choice, because we're probably going to talk about drones.
00:18:16
Speaker
Drones and Lidar, I think. Drones and Lidar. Lidar mounted on drones, more than likely. And bathymetric Lidar, term I didn't know existed before reading this, but it makes perfect sense. Absolutely. I think what most of this boils down to, and Paul, tell me if your reading said something a little bit different, but what a lot of this just boils down to is
00:18:37
Speaker
is photogrammetry, to be honest, and using LiDAR and things like that to enhance the photogrammetry. But really, photogrammetry from multiple sources, bringing it all into one massive model that they can use. And they've got some pretty great photographs in this picture. They do. I wish they'd gone into a little more details as to what they used to combine these, because a lot of the discussion they have is about combining various disparate 3D data sets.
00:19:05
Speaker
LIDAR and photogrammetry above ground, underwater, aerial borne, UAVs, all the above, all mixed together. They talk about GIS a little bit, they talk about photogrammetry programs for assembling these things, but there isn't much in the way of a how-to.
Site Formation and Underwater Discoveries
00:19:25
Speaker
Which is fine. That's not what this article's purpose was. This article's purpose was to illustrate that it can be done and it can be done at slightly different scales and for slightly different reasons. But I would have liked to, you know, the techy of me would have liked a little more details to how.
00:19:40
Speaker
But that's I mean, you know, one thing and I don't know if you touched on this a little bit. I had a little bit of a catastrophic brief Wi-Fi crash there. So another thought that kept on winding through everything I was reading here, I was thinking about how.
00:19:56
Speaker
they were discussing the landscape and about how terrestrial archaeologists tend to. And one of the things, you know, you're talking about shipwrecks versus sunken sites, and they make that distinction as well. They were talking about the two as those the two broad categories of of maritime sites that they deal with. And I thought, you know, shipwrecks, I remember forever, topographic maps being an important part of understanding a shipwreck, you know, the Taffanama processes, what happened after that ship went down?
00:20:22
Speaker
how the content, how it broke apart, how the contents got scattered, what happened to the currents that moved things this way or that way. And we don't normally think about site formation with archaeological sites above ground, well, not above ground, terrestrial archaeological sites.
00:20:40
Speaker
in that same way. And we kind of have a basic understanding of it, but it's not normally part of the discussion. It seems that it's pretty foundational to dealing with a shipwreck site. And so I think that that kind of informs in a very deep way the way the maritime archaeologists think about sites and their formation versus the way that we terrestrial archaeologists do.
00:21:01
Speaker
I'm just going to do a little brief illustration that has nothing to do with maritime archaeology. In 1998 or 1999, I worked on a site in Syria. It was a typical tell site, a very small little pimple of a site with most of the important buildings up on the high part of the pimple and everything else spread out on the low tell around.
00:21:23
Speaker
There was two different projects working on the site at the same time. One of them was doing a step trench down the steepest part of the of the high part of the tell. And we decided that we're going to try to find some of the some of the outline on that outline, but some of the lower tell some of the probably residential areas. So we picked a flat spot.
00:21:42
Speaker
And we dug through that flat spot for about two meters before we gave up on it because we found nothing other than silt and very few artifacts of any kind. It was mostly we gave up on it because we realized it was just the dirt runoff from the high part of the tell on down onto the lower part of the tell. And so then we moved to a different part, another edge where the city wall would have been, the ancient city wall.
00:22:06
Speaker
And then we could hit more architecture again. But on that flat part, because we weren't used to thinking of the site formation in terms of what happens after the site had been abandoned, we think of the site formation as how it is built up, why we have a tell there, but not so much what happens after that tells been abandoned. And we have centuries of wash from the upper part down onto the lower part. We wasted a lot of our time digging a big trench of nothing.
00:22:34
Speaker
That, I feel, is something that the maritime archaeologist, certainly the people writing this article, would not have made. I think that that would have been an understanding of theirs from the get-go, is how to deal with the site after it happens. Because a shipwreck site isn't a site, generally, until that ship goes down in that spot. And then from there on out, it's entirely taphonomic processes, what's happening to it.
00:22:59
Speaker
So that was an interesting way I thought of looking at it, very kind of inverted from how I'm used to thinking of sites, but it kind of wends its way through their entire discussion.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah, it does. I think just as an aside, like you mentioned, the underwater sites, unless there's something still sticking out, or maybe it's not that old, or there's not a lot of sediment flow in that area, and it hasn't been buried very deeply.
00:23:30
Speaker
because of the way sediment does settle in a water environment, you know, it really smooths out unlike the centuries it takes for that to happen in a terrestrial site because of wind and water and things like that. But an underwater site, when sediment lands, I mean, it just kind of flows out and spreads out nice and evenly and really hides everything super easily. So trying to find stuff underwater has got to be just ridiculously hard. In fact, it's sort of timely that we're doing this, but what is it, Herodotus' boat or something like that was just found?
00:23:59
Speaker
or something he mentioned that's like a 2,600 year old shipwreck or something that was found in the Mediterranean just recently. I know we probably should have brought that up. I'm just now remembering that. Let me see if I can't link to that in the show notes at the very least. Just looking at this stuff and how all this ties together, I think
00:24:18
Speaker
That's just making me think about this article in the photographs and illustrations that they have in here because they really do a good job at showing you throughout. They start with individual techniques and say, well, here's an example of this. Here's an example of that.
00:24:32
Speaker
and they come on down and then you get down to close to the end of the article, and there is exactly what they're talking about. Figure 14.8 in the article, if you're following along on page 225, has a multi-dataset 3D working environment, that's what they call it, of the coastal prehistoric
00:24:50
Speaker
I don't even know how to say that. I think it's a Danish site. Hijamo, Hijama, I don't even know, site and landscape showing several layers of aerial and underwater photogrammetry indicated with LiDAR data. I mean, this is it right here. This is like, this is some of the best archeological map data reconstruction that I've ever seen, you know, because we've talked about a lot of stuff on this show, but it's usually one or maybe two aspects of these technologies. And these guys did everything and brought it all together in a single dataset. And the nice thing about,
00:25:20
Speaker
The way that we do these things is if you have
00:25:24
Speaker
mappable points in space. Well, that's all the system needs to bring it all together. You know, if you can create a map that has a three dimensional point in space, you can bring all these maps together. And I'm pretty sure stuff like photo scan and, um, which is now meta shape, I'm still going to call it photo scan though. I'm pretty sure they can, you can bring those in and have that done. Like you can bring in different LIDAR and other data sets, as long as it's like point cloud type data that it can read and then just bring into your own system. And, uh, yeah.
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of the few products that they actually do mention by name in here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. So anyway, I just think it's really cool. And I'm trying to think, you know, this really should be applied to, I would say most, most coastal sites. And one of the cool things would be to see in areas like up here in Nevada,
00:26:16
Speaker
You know, half of Nevada used to be underwater. That's why it's called the Great Basin. You know, after the end of the last ice age, it was called, um, Lahontan, Lake Lahontan. And it filled much, it was a big inland sea and it filled much of the area to the, to the east of the, uh, like pretty much between the Sierras and the Rockies.
00:26:33
Speaker
It was a lot of area covered by this lake. We have a lot of coastal archaeological sites that are, of course, in the high desert now. You can just see the different water lines when you're at some of these basin areas where there might be a little lake there now, but usually it's a playa or something like that. Everybody's heard of the playa for Burning Man. It's a playa because it used to be the bottom of a lake.
00:26:56
Speaker
Well, I'm not sure if the Native Americans way back in that time were constructing boats. I know they had like reed boats at some point, but I'm not sure what kind of any maritime culture that they had that would have been found now. I'm actually really sketchy on that kind of detail. But we do find sites that were around the lake edge where they were utilizing those sorts of resources and
00:27:16
Speaker
You know, given seasonality, sometimes those would have been buried and sometimes not, but we can use these different techniques to bring all that together and then maybe bring in the water as an illustrative technique and show where this would have been and how it would have changed through time. I don't know. I don't know if this applies, but it's making me think about it.
00:27:36
Speaker
What they're doing great here is not just mixing in the different kinds of data sets, which is neat. I think we're all going to be doing that. But also, and as we've mentioned before, blurring that line then between the terrestrial and the maritime. And on that 14.8, excuse me,
00:27:55
Speaker
At first glance, you don't even notice which part of it is above ground and which is submerged. It takes a moment to look at it and then that fluidity, no pun intended, between whether or not something is dry land or submerged is, you know, it's going to change through time and even places that have a relatively constant coastline, if people are utilizing, if people are doing things up
00:28:19
Speaker
on the coast, on the dry land, and then down in the water. They're building things, which is something that gets mentioned in the article. They are maybe fishing and bringing the fish back onto the land to process. There's this interplay, this human interplay between what's happening on land and in water that, again, the maritime archaeologists seem to really grok and that we have to think about more deeply. And I think that can really be turned around and applied towards, in a purely terrestrial environment, landscape studies.
00:28:47
Speaker
We have a lot of trouble defining what a site is. Maybe not UNCRM because you probably have legal definitions of what makes a site. Every grad student's project anywhere in the Middle East, every survey project has a different definition of what they want a site to be. Is it standing architecture?
00:29:06
Speaker
Is it a tell? Is it a certain density of assured scatter? Is it, you know, how do you deal with roads? Are road sites? Sure, they can be, depending who, well, now a road linking two different cities. Are those all with the same site? Maybe in a landscape sense they are, maybe not, depending on what your research design is.
00:29:25
Speaker
What? I'm muddying the waters even more? Again, I didn't mean to make that pun there, but of extending the boundaries, using these various kinds of data collection to blur the lines between what's the site and what's not the site, between what's underwater and what's above water.
00:29:46
Speaker
To expand our viewpoint as archaeologists, I think that's really good, is to step back a little bit, take a slightly broader overview of the site itself or the region, the landscape, whatever scale we're working at, and then zoom back in on the research questions that really interest us.
Digital Landscapes and Public Engagement
00:30:03
Speaker
Whether they're more purely taphonomic, whether there's something very specific about how something was done or who lived where when, or any of a million different questions you could ask.
00:30:12
Speaker
But this is again just a refreshing way for me to have looked at it because it does raise a whole bunch of questions Maybe that I thought before but definitely with a fresh set of eyes, you know near the end of the article they start talking about They've got the images here that look like they're from a video game which are which are realistic because from that standpoint because they're talking about using the unity gaming engine which everybody's using these days to really
00:30:39
Speaker
put together a landscape that you can manipulate and move around in. These things are just so powerful, which Paul, I don't think we've talked about this yet. When I was at the Society for California Archaeology meetings, I met this guy who's working for a tribe in Southern California, and some of the things that he's doing with these guys
00:30:59
Speaker
Well, let me back up a little second here because using this Unity gaming engine to bring all these data together and really making it come to life and look really lifelike and manipulatable has two benefits. One, it allows archaeologists to revisit a site that they might not be able to revisit. So you can go there virtually and really absorb what the site is, not just looking at maps, not just looking at data.
00:31:22
Speaker
but really stand there and observe the site and even start doing things like, well, what did this look like 10,000 years ago from an environmental standpoint? And let's add that layer in. Let's see what that looks like. And where was the water level 5,000 years ago? Let's play with that and see how it affects the site. And not only just looking at it as a computer model, but standing there from a virtual reality standpoint. Put on your goggles and get into the site from wherever you're at, from whatever time frame you're at, removed from when these data were collected.
00:31:50
Speaker
So that's great from a scientific standpoint, but also from a public archaeology standpoint. I mean, how many people get to go here and see these things? I mean, this was up in Scotland. They did a lot of this and then over in Denmark as well. And I mean, while the locals might have an easy time getting there.
00:32:07
Speaker
know who else does, honestly. And without great expense just to get over there and see these things. So from a public archaeology standpoint, I think collecting these kind of data are great. And this leads me back to the gentleman I was talking to at the Society for California Archaeology meeting. And I want to put this out there because I know people are collecting information like this and it will allow us to share information a little better because that's one of the biggest things we always talk about is how to share
00:32:32
Speaker
these highly accurate data with the public because we don't want them knowing where this stuff is. I mean, that's what it all comes down to. And one of the things they're doing is they basically go out to an area, they'll map out an area that they're going to survey first. And they take these placards, the kind that you can print out from photo scan, like the markers, and they go out there and they record artifacts. And when they record,
00:32:54
Speaker
artifacts and features, they don't actually take a GPS with them. They don't record any spatial data, no location information at all, but they record the photographs. They actually do photogrammetry out there, so they'll take a bunch of photographs so they can do photogrammetry later.
00:33:07
Speaker
And they'll record the textual information. They'll do all that stuff. And then instead of taking a GPS point, they just leave this marker on the ground. Okay. Then they'll take a drone and fly over and do photogrammetry of the entire area. And the drone reads those. Well, photoscan actually, when you bring all this together, we'll read those markers. And now photoscan knows where those markers are. So now you got to do,
00:33:30
Speaker
is put the model in a point in space. And what they do for that is they take a sub meter GPS and they take super highly accurate averaged points in four different areas around the corners of the site. And they, they, I mean, you're talking about resolving a point for like 30 to 45 minutes. He said, they just leave it on there. They get the most detailed, accurate point that they can.
00:33:50
Speaker
And the beauty of things like PhotoScan is when you put all this stuff together, you put those four points in, immediately, once those four points are installed, the entire model has 3D representation. Like, you know where every single point is. That's why they don't have to take points on the artifacts. They know where the artifacts are. When they're finished, they can put the artifacts on the ground, the photogrammetry that they did for those.
00:34:11
Speaker
And now you can zoom in, you can move around the landscape, see where the artifacts and features are, see labels for them and see all that kind of stuff. But if you don't have those four points in the corners, then you don't know where it's at. And the way that they manage this from the tribal standpoint,
00:34:25
Speaker
is they basically, they're allowed to hand out this model to anybody that wants to see it. But those, the locations of those four corner points are locked away in a safe in the tribal offices. And they're the only ones that get to know where these landscapes are. So these landscapes are divorced from their overall landscape. It's just a tiny picture that is the site and anybody can see that because you can't tell where it's at. Like there's absolutely no way. So I think that's the future of public archeology right there. And it's not that hard to do. That's interesting.
00:34:54
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's what this is leading to. I mean, if you definitely think so. Yeah. If you had all this stuff here and you just took away the spatial data and said, well, here's this thing, but you don't know where it's at, then there's really no damage that can be done by showing it to anybody because this kind of site, like this last unity gaming engine video here are these pictures. I mean, this could be anywhere. Right. Honestly. Yeah. I do think it's kind of funny. You know, we had we had Sebastian Heath on a couple of episodes ago.
00:35:21
Speaker
The talk that I heard him give most recently was about 3D tools for archaeologists. It started with some fairly basic ones and ended up with gaming engines. We have a similar sort of overall arc to this article here ending with gaming engines. I do think that it's really nicely done. The first images that they have in the article are of this castle in Scotland. There's an aerial photograph and a topo map made from photogrammetry.
00:35:51
Speaker
From presumably from the same drone flies. Oh, yeah, it says drone elevation values right there and then the very end the the game engine shots that they have the the rendered reconstructed castle over its over the little bay that's looking out on to
00:36:09
Speaker
is again of the same site. So they've kind of bookended their entire article with this one site in Scotland, but discussed obviously a number of different sites in between. I thought that was just structurally well done on their part.
00:36:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So, well, I think that about wraps up our discussion of this topic. I would love to get a maritime archaeologist on again after reading this and having sort of a different concept of what this all means because before it's like, how do you take notes underwater?
00:36:42
Speaker
That kind of stuff. But now really thinking about the landscape has just opened up so many more questions for me and how we can use all these different technologies to bring it together into a cohesive 3D dataset that we can share and show other people. Well, I do think that one thing that they don't mention this explicitly, or if they did, I missed it.
00:37:02
Speaker
The kind of the blurring the line between the terrestrial and the maritime is going to be becoming increasingly important to us as terrestrial archaeologists in areas in coastal areas because we're expecting that the coastlines are going to get flooded in many parts of the world with global warming as the water levels rise.
00:37:23
Speaker
Being able to be more flexible about how we see the edge of the site and be able to, when we need to look under the water and not just draw our maps to that water's edge, is going to be increasingly important to get a realistic understanding of how these sites worked. These sites can be any coastal site anywhere that will be affected by rising waters.
00:37:45
Speaker
Well, if we had the money, I would say one mandate that I'd like to see cities and counties do, at least in the United States, is
00:37:53
Speaker
take their coastal environments and do some overflights of them. Do some overflights and get the initial, we need a baseline. Right now, we need a baseline picture that we can turn into photogrammetry, photogrammetric models later on and understand what these are as the waters start to rise. And even if, hey, maybe something happens, maybe something crazy goes and the water starts to recede. Even then, we'd like to know where the baseline is now and that's just something we don't have. We have satellite imagery, you're right, and we have
00:38:23
Speaker
historic satellite imagery because they save all that. But I think it's a little different than photogrammetry. But now that I'm saying that out loud, you can probably produce a pretty decent photogrammetric model from the right satellite data that you have. So maybe you don't need to get the close-in, highly tight interval stuff if you're just trying to get a baseline picture of what the coastlines look like. But who knows? Anyway, it's something we should be thinking about. But that's just a fairy tale because if there's no mandate for it,
00:38:51
Speaker
Nobody's going to pay for it. Even if we didn't do the heavy photogrammetry, because that's what takes so long, is doing the actual stitching together of everything. Even just the flights, those are expensive. Even if you're just using drones, it's still expensive. Then you've got to store all that somewhere. These guys, on one of these, they mentioned
00:39:12
Speaker
I don't remember which one it was, but on one of these early on, they mentioned taking something like 6,000 photographs. I think it was of this boat, this underwater photogrammetry, 6,000 images to produce a 3D record. It doesn't even look like that big of an area that this boat is spread out in, but just 6,000 pictures, that's what it took. We've just got an image of it here, but I'd love to be able to see the actual 3D representation of this. That'd be pretty neat.
00:39:37
Speaker
All right. Well, Paul, any final thoughts on this before we head on to the Up To The Day segment? No. I think we pretty much exhausted everything I can say about it other than, wow, this is so cool. It's really neat when you see a subfield of our field that you have very little understanding of and you can learn a lot.
00:39:57
Speaker
Even though it's not even an intro to maritime archaeology, but I learned a lot just reading this article. I think it was good for anybody not familiar with what goes on down there. They do a lot of explanation and a lot of just baseline, here's what we're talking about stuff, which I really appreciate. They didn't just dive into a bunch of stuff. They really laid out what their thoughts were on the whole theory behind all this, which was really cool.
00:40:22
Speaker
All right. Well, we're going to take a break and we will come back in just a minute with our app of the day segment. Stay tuned for that back in a second. Hey everyone. Chris Webster here to talk about the archaeology podcast network affiliate pages. Affiliate pages are great because you get awesome stuff and we get a little kickback for it, which helps keep the lights on over here. So we have two primary affiliates and I would say a secondary affiliate in wild note.
00:40:47
Speaker
because we advertise for WildNote all the time. Check it out at wildnoteapp.com. But one of ours is a side hustle. It's a digital marketing course taught by a friend of mine named Seth Himes. And head on over to artpodnet.com forward slash side hustle to learn more
Timular App Overview and Updates
00:41:03
Speaker
about that. If you want a little bit of a thing to do in the evening, maybe pick up some clients, learn how to do digital marketing, this is an excellent way to do that. We also have Timular as an affiliate, which I'm about to talk about in my app of the day segment.
00:41:16
Speaker
Timeular is great. Head on over to artpodnet.com forward slash Timeular, T-I-M-E-U-L-A-R. If you want to accurately track your projects for project management, for billing, for whatever you need, check out Timeular. So that's artpodnet.com forward slash Timeular. Of course, if you just go over to the Archeology Podcast Network website, click on the shop button in the upper right hand corner, you'll find all these links, plus links to all the other things that we have out there, including our membership plans.
00:41:45
Speaker
So, arcpodnet.com forward slash whatever you want. Now back to the show.
00:41:58
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to the archaeotech podcast episode one Oh three. And we're going to launch straight into our app of the day segment. And I don't very often do this because I don't know, quite frankly, when apps update, usually it's not. Spectacular, but I'm enjoying this app so much. And they just released a new update update to their, I almost said update. That's kind of a cool, cool word. You know, quite quick. I mean, uh, I know, right? Copy mark, whatever.
00:42:23
Speaker
That's right, that's right. So there is a new app date to this app for desktop anyway. I haven't seen my mobile app update, but we'll see. But it's Timular. And I've talked about Timular before. It's a little time shifting cube thing where you can track different projects up to eight different tasks, I guess, or projects or however you want to assign it. But I thought the update to this was really good. And I've had a lot more time
00:42:48
Speaker
with the app as well. And I can speak about which pricing plan you should probably go with if you're going to do this. So let me backtrack just a little bit. Timular again is a white cube. Now
00:43:03
Speaker
I'm talking about this in the app of the day segment because you can actually just go to timular.com, T I M E U L A R and download their app for free and use it. You don't need the cube. The cube is a nice visual indication that you need to switch your time because sometimes we forget if you get a phone call and you've got phone calls on your, on one of your sides, if you've got email, if you've got, you know, somebody walks in the door or you're, you're messing around on Facebook and you want to track that.
00:43:29
Speaker
is something, it's a nice visual indication sitting right on your desk that you have time that you're tracking and you need to flip it. But if you've got a lot of screen real estate, maybe you've got a multi-screen system and you can just have Timular up in a window there, then you can visually see that you need to switch the time. So feel free to use Timular for free without the Cube, okay? That's one thing I don't think people really understand. I've had others ask me about Timular, probably because I set up an affiliate relationship with the Archeology Podcast Network as well. So if you do buy the Cube,
00:43:59
Speaker
The APN gets a little bit of a kickback. In fact, I think it's a really good kickback. Timeular, if you just get the Cube, it's a one-time payment of $99. And I believe the APN gets like $20 on that because somebody's already bought one. Yeah, it's a pretty good kickback for us. So if you go to arcpodnet.com forward slash Timeular, T-I-M-E-U-L-A-R,
00:44:19
Speaker
you can click on the link right there and it'll just take you to the time in the website and the affiliate link, all that does is, and if you purchase something through the website by clicking through to our link, then it tracks that back to us. So anyway, let me talk about the software real quick, the update. So I'm on Mac and it updated across all platforms and it works on windows, you know, PC, whatever you've got. And really what they did was they did something that was somewhat ingenious is
00:44:48
Speaker
On the normal tracking page, I guess there used to be just, it would show you, um, it would show you the thing that you were tracking and then, um, have a big, like, you know, one of those hollowed out donuts that was tracking around, uh, marking your time. And then you could, you could put the activity down there and, and everything you're doing with all the hashtags and add symbols. So you could track it.
00:45:08
Speaker
But now that's been replaced by basically a calendar view that shows me right now, Monday through Sunday. So a seven day calendar review starting on Monday. And it just, it enters, it puts entries right on the calendar view here, um, as I'm going through throughout my day. Now it did that before, but you could only see one day at a time unless you went to the, um, unless you went to the tracking section where you could then see a whole week or whatever range you wanted to see.
00:45:35
Speaker
So I think this is really cool, um, and a nice way to visualize it. And it's really graphically stable, which means as I'm looking at a, at a calendar entry here, uh, it's, and it's a normal calendar entry as you're used to seeing on Gmail or whatever. Um, there's a little thing in the, in the bottom corner. That's that's just got a little thing tracking around to show me that I'm currently tracking that time.
00:45:55
Speaker
And if I'm not tracking any time, then there's obviously nothing going on. So they made it more stable. They said people have been using a lot more hashtags to track everything. So they're just loading up with hashtags. And apparently their app was crashing because of that. I usually only use one or two hashtags to track stuff. I use an ad symbol to track, say, a client or large thing. So let's say, for example, I have a podcast client. And I'll use the ad symbol to track her. So I've got her name under the ad symbol.
00:46:23
Speaker
So, I can search by that, and then within that, I can search the hashtags I have associated with her. So, she's a podcast client, so I usually only have three hashtags, editing, recording, and consulting. So, those three things I want to track within her overall trackable, I guess, relationship.
00:46:49
Speaker
Anyway, go check it out, timular.com. And now I'm going to talk real quick about the pricing plans. So they've got basic pro and lifetime. And basic is just 99 bucks for the tracker. And then the software is free forever. And then I first did the pro version because they had a deal where basically you got the tracker for $49 and you got the pro for $7, but you had to buy
00:47:15
Speaker
What was it? Six months straight off. So you basically paid the same amount for the, for the basic tracker, but you got to try out the pro software for free basically for six months. That's how that worked out. And I think I'm, I'm off the pro software now. I think I'm actually still paying for the pro at $7 a month, but I'm, uh, uh, it's monthly or something like that. But just looking at this, the only things you get from the pro software that you don't get with the, uh, with the free software.
00:47:39
Speaker
is data export as CSV and Excel, which I've never once used. Integrations in which they don't have very many, so that doesn't really seem very useful to me. Now, they do integrate with toggle, which is another time tracker, which
00:47:54
Speaker
Seems a little crazy that you would integrate this with toggle. I guess if your company's already using toggle, which I worked with a company that did before, and it's spelled T-O-G-G-L, toggle's also a paid service. You can use it for free if you're not tracking where many things, but I guess the tracker will actually work toggle is how that would work.
00:48:10
Speaker
Jira, which is a project manager software, and Harvest, which I have not used. Actually, I guess I do integrate it with my calendar. So when I do flip a time, there's a special timular calendar that I have that shows me in that calendar view. But now I don't really need that because Timely just displays as a calendar. So anyway,
00:48:31
Speaker
I don't really think the integrations are that important unless you're solidly using one of those that they have. Then there's a weekly insights report, which I get that. It's just an email that summarizes my weekly time, which really just makes me more sad than anything else that I spent 165 hours last week doing something.
00:48:50
Speaker
Then priority support, which sure, I've never needed support, so I guess that's good to have. I don't know that that's worth $7 a month. If you are tracking this and you want to export your data as a CSV or Excel file, so you can bring it into a timesheet application or something else and you're really tracking this at work. Now, I work for myself, so I don't need to report to anybody.
00:49:13
Speaker
But if you were actually using this to report to someone, then that might be a useful thing and you might want that export capability. But otherwise, I would say try this out for free, get the tracker, or just try the software and go from there. You don't need to click through the affiliate link if you're just trying the software because it's free, so you don't get anything from that.
00:49:33
Speaker
Then they have the Lifetime, which is a tracker for $49 and the software for $299. There's no recurring payments. So if you think you're going to use this for the rest of your life, which seems unlikely, then you can pay $300 and have it for free forever.
00:49:49
Speaker
So that's pretty much it. Just an update to an app we've already discussed. And I literally use this every second of the day because I track times when I'm not working as well. I like to know how I'm spending my day. That's basically how I use it. So I track everything. I have an other face on my thing. And if I'm not near my desk, I just use it on my phone.
00:50:09
Speaker
Um, and then under other, I have different at symbols like my civil air patrol time. It's not paid time, of course, I'm a volunteer, but I like to track how much time I spend at civil air patrol. Um, you know, and I track other things through that, through that other tab as well. So anyway, that's it for that. Uh, just a really quick update on timeular. So definitely go check it out. And if you want to help support the APN, if you think you're going to buy one of those trackers, arc podnet.com forward slash timeular T I M E U L A R.
00:50:39
Speaker
Alright, what do you got, Paul?
Introduction to Kitty Hawk App
00:50:41
Speaker
Well, I was just gonna comment, actually, on what you were just saying, the data export, which is something you don't use because you like using the, you like using Timular to find out how you're using your time. But it seems to me that the data export is, you know, custom made for anybody or tailor made, rather, for anybody who
00:50:57
Speaker
who needs to report for billing purposes, how they're using their time, how much time they spent on project A, B, or C. I don't know if it would work for somebody, for a lawyer per se, but certainly a lot of different kinds of consultancy jobs would benefit from something like that. And just as a general point, you and I have discussed data export in a bunch of different contexts and we're always big fans of that.
00:51:21
Speaker
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It's nice to get your data out. Like I said, I don't use it, but I imagine nearly every single other person that gets this would probably be reporting to someone because that's generally the rule. So yeah, you might need that. And your company would probably pay for it because it's saving you a lot of time on reporting. Yeah, you potentially could. I mean, especially when we were talking about, I remember when you first mentioned it and you were pretty excited to get your hands on it. And I mean that literally get your hands on it because of the physical gratification of taking and turning that cube around to the
00:51:50
Speaker
to its different faces as you track your time, which is an interesting, you know, bring the real world into the virtual world kind of interface. The other thing is that $7 a month, if you're going to get your company to pay for it, I mean, how much time? I remember when I was working for companies and we had to, you know, every minute is billable. And so you have to spend time filling out your time card and or at least tracking your time in some way. And
00:52:13
Speaker
I'll tell you what, this is $7 a month, which equates to less than 25 cents a day, which I don't know how many billable hours that is for you. That's probably about 30 seconds worth. If it's only costing you 30 seconds per day to track your time, then I think it's totally worth it if you look at it from a numbers standpoint. Yeah, it could well be.
00:52:35
Speaker
All right, your turn. Yeah, my turn. So this is going to be very brief because I haven't used this program particularly much other than just to say, wow, I'm really impressed by how deep it is. So backtrack a little bit. I mentioned a few episodes back how I purchased a used drone and I've been learning how to fly it and I am starting on the process of getting my part 107 certification. Yeah, I'm hoping that that'll be a selling point perhaps if I can get some shovel bomb work this summer.
00:53:04
Speaker
Anyhow, in an off time I was looking at what different kinds of software available. The drone that I have is a slightly older one and the software that DJI has for it doesn't do all the bells and whistles that newer drones do. But there are other software packages out there that fill in the gaps, do things like follow a particular object or
00:53:24
Speaker
orbit around a given point or follow a track. One of the big ones is Litchy and I think I might at some point, that's paid software, it's 20 some dollars. So at some point, I'll probably pay for that just so I can test it out properly. But as I was looking, I found another class of software that was kind of interesting.
00:53:44
Speaker
planning in the broader sense, not necessarily in the sense of what I'm going to do on this next flight, but how I'm managing my equipment. The one that I found that was really interesting to me is called Kitty Hawk. The website is kittyhawk.io and it's available both on iOS and on Google Play. It runs on your device, your phone, or your tablet. It
00:54:10
Speaker
is really astounding how deep it is. I use it. First thing you have to do is set up an account. But even at this point, to launch it, it takes itself seriously. I have to put in my thumbprint to actually get into the program on my own phone. And I look here and it gives me a map of where I'm at. That makes sense. But it's also overlaid upon that is the FAA map so I can see if I can fly where I'm at currently.
00:54:40
Speaker
In Manhattan, I couldn't, but up in the country, I can. I'm technically right at the very edge of the area around the Danbury Airport. I don't think I can fly in my front yard, but I can fly in my backyard.
00:54:56
Speaker
Yeah. Right at the limit. Anyhow, if you go to the website, you see what the software does. It says preflight planning. You can run checklists and so on. In-flight operations that basically takes over in place of the DJI Go app. And I've used this a couple of times. And it's very similar to the DJI Go app. But in my opinion, it's slightly cleaner. The interface is a little bit pared down, a little more intuitive for me. That's your mileage may vary kind of thing.
00:55:25
Speaker
but I like it.
00:55:29
Speaker
You can get your authorizations directly through the app. Live streaming and this is its big selling point is team operations. So if you have a fleet of drones and a team of operators, you can bring them all into the same account and you can account for who's flying where, who's flying what, how much time is being logged on a particular drone and so on. And that's what I'm saying. This is way deeper software than I need.
00:55:56
Speaker
But I love the interface where it's extremely clean and fairly intuitive for how much it gives, how much information it gives me. It gives me weather information right across the middle. If I look at the main screen, it gives me the map at the top, weather information across the middle, a whole bunch of information about the flight itself down below, the drone that I'd be using, whether I'm in good airspace or not, on down the line, the status of the drone. It links into the DJI app on my,
00:56:25
Speaker
on my phone, so it actually downloaded all the flight information from previous flights I'd done with DJI Go. The pricing for it, if you're a single operator, is free, which is why I started playing with this. I don't know what the pricing is for teams because it says contact sales. They treat themselves like
00:56:44
Speaker
enterprise software and it shows and I'm sure it's priced accordingly. But the other interesting thing about Kitty Hawk is that one of the drone management kind of software things that you'd mentioned at episode 90 was Before You Fly, which is the FAA's software to tell you if you can fly where you're at.
00:57:05
Speaker
And you'd mentioned at the time that it's kind of rough around the edges. And as I was looking, before I ran into Kitty Hawk, I saw something that's on a forum online talking about before you fly and the same sorts of complaints that you'd brought up, like, yes, it's useful, but it's really clunky.
00:57:23
Speaker
And apparently Kitty Hawk has won the contract to redesign for the FAA before you fly. And so looking at the quality of their own software and seeing how much of before you fly is kind of already rolled into Kitty Hawk, I kind of have a sense that they're going to just cleave some bits off of their flagship app.
00:57:44
Speaker
and call it before you fly and sell that back to the FAA who can then give it away to us. But interesting world out there, lots of stuff I didn't know anything about and it's always interesting to me to see what kinds of software, kinds of solutions people are finding to their particular sets of problems because since I'm just a beginner at this whole drone world, this particular sets of problems are all brand new to me.
00:58:10
Speaker
Yeah, this is pretty cool software. I'm definitely going to have to check this out. I'm really interested in the FAA authorizations right in-app. That is kind of amazing, because that's one of the biggest pains in the ass that you can do with this. I think they're based out of San Francisco, so I think they're being a little bit overzealous with their authorization on the picture that they have on the thing here, because it says they're in the San Francisco's Class B airspace, which is pretty much
00:58:38
Speaker
You know, right there at the airport or you're at a super high altitude, one of the two things, and then the FAA authorized flight operations. Now that's, I guess not too out of their own possibility because, you know, San Francisco airport is right in the middle of civilization except for the part over water. So if you're going to fly at say a parking lot nearby, you're in class B airspace that goes to the ground. And as long as you're not going to go over 400 feet, then you're probably fine, you know? And that's, man, getting clearance to fly your drone in class B though, that's got to be something.
00:59:08
Speaker
Yeah. Anyway, I don't even like flying a regular plane in Class B airspace to be honest. It's too nerve wracking. Anyway, yeah, this is really cool. I like it. And I like that it's free for one use, which they don't even say on their website. Like you said, it just says contact sales all over it, which means it can't be cheap once you go.
00:59:26
Speaker
Well, if you do click the contact sales, you'll see solo pilot download the free kiddie hack app here. And they've got a web component so that if you're a team leader, you can maintain contact with everybody else that's out in the field right there through your web browser.
00:59:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's really cool and I've only scratched the surface of it. And I think being a solo operator, I only ever would just scratch the surface of it. But again, it's really neat to see what kinds of solutions are out there for problems that I didn't even know existed.
01:00:00
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Well, uh, I don't know if this can be useful with our topic today, which was maritime technology, you know, cause the FAA doesn't really care if you're under the water or not. We were talking about drones over the water and combining all that stuff and, and, and bringing it all into one. So this might be something handy for, uh, people working in that space or really anyone that's a fan of this. Um, and you're not even listening to this part right now because you're so hammered because we said drone so many times.
01:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sorry if you're playing the drunken game. Nice, nice. All right, so check out the show notes for this episode, arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash 103. Learn all about Timular. I'll go ahead and put the affiliate link right in the show notes link so you don't have to click too many times.
01:00:49
Speaker
and then check out this Kitty Hawk software as well, which we'll have in there at the same time. Especially if you're just a small company and you need that FAA authorization, which you do no matter where you're working. If you're using it for commercial use, you need FAA authorization. So just keep in mind too, if you're also on BLM line or something, you also need BLM authorization or Forest Service authorization.
01:01:10
Speaker
or whatever federal agency you're working for. And as I was talking to somebody just a few days ago, they didn't realize this. If you're in a national park, you're not going to get authorization. It's just not going to happen unless you're working directly with the national park or something like that. It's just off the table for national parks from what I understand. So unless you're directly working for them or on a project that's being paid for by the National Park Service, there might be some stuff there. And I'm just saying maybe. But if you're going camping this summer or you're going traveling this summer,
01:01:40
Speaker
don't try to fly your drone in a national park. It's not wise and it's not going to happen. Plus, there's so many people around. It's just not a good time. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Paul. That was a great app and I'm excited to check it out.
01:01:56
Speaker
Yeah. We'll talk to you guys next time. We've got a great interview coming up on the next show with Edward Gonzales, tenant, and talking all about the projects he's working on and some interesting tech stuff. So come back and check that out. All right. Thanks, Paul. Thank you.
01:02:18
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.
01:02:44
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:03:05
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 arcpotnet.com slash members for more info.