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Magnetometry on the Lagash Project (Archaeotech 191) - TAS 206
1.1k Plays2 years ago
Chris is sick this week and needs to let his voice rest so we are playing a really awesome episode of Archaeotech with Chris and his co-host Paul Zimmerman. Recently an article came out in CNN featuring the work that the team Paul is part of is doing in Iraq, so it was the perfect opportunity to talk about that article and play the episode that they recorded a couple months ago about how they use Magnetometry at Lagash.
Links
- Archaeologists find 5,000-year-old tavern -- including food remains -- in Iraq
- Magnetometry on the Lagash Project - Archaeotech 191
- Geophysics in the Middle East with Marco Wolf - ArchaeoTech 192
- In the Field with the Lagash Archaeological Project, Iraq - TAS
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Hosts Discuss Health and Article on Paul Zimmerman
00:00:16
Speaker
Alright everybody, welcome to episode 206 of The Archaeology Show. Hello! So I feel like garbage. Yeah, you're pretty sick right now. And I'm getting over a cold. Yeah, so I kind of caught a little bit of your stuff and I can't make it through an entire recording without just like coughing my brains out. Yeah, we had a whole episode ready to record, but we're gonna postpone that.
00:00:36
Speaker
Yeah, so instead of doing that, we are actually going to talk just briefly about an article that someone who's been on this show actually linked to us in our members-only Slack team for the Archaeotech show.
Zimmerman's Discovery of Ancient Tavern
00:00:49
Speaker
And it's Paul Zimmerman. He's co-host of the Archaeotech podcast with me.
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah, he's been on our show before talking about some of the work that he's done over at the Lagash site in Iraq. And he was, you know, recently there and, you know, we always talk about news articles and he actually sent this link to us. It's in cnn.com. It's called, archaeologists find 5,000 year old tavern, including food remains in Iraq.
00:01:17
Speaker
And we're just reading through it. It's really cool. It's all about the work that he was doing on his project. And lo and behold, there's a picture of our buddy Paul, like right in the middle of the article, doing the work that he was doing there, which is kind of, I don't even know what that is. He's pushing a magnetometry rig. I'm pretty sure. There you go. Yeah. Yeah.
00:01:36
Speaker
On episode 191 of the archaeotech podcast, we talked all about doing magnetometry in Lagash with Paul. We're going to link to this article so you can take a look at that article. You can see Paul in action with all of his coworkers and colleagues out there. But also we are, because again, I can't, I've edited already several times out my coughing.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah. So we're going to play right now the episode of Archaeotech podcast, episode 191, as I mentioned, from just last fall of Paul talking about doing the magnetometry survey.
Paul Zimmerman's Previous Episodes and Current Work
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah. And this is not the first time that we've talked to them, like we said. So we have a past episode for anybody who might be new and hasn't heard it before. We'll link to that past episode as well so that you can go listen to Paul and several of his colleagues talking about the different work that they were doing there last field season. So
00:02:24
Speaker
between this show and the Archea Tech podcast, we've talked about Lagash and some of Paul's work over there a number of times. In fact, he brought on somebody who was part of the German team there named Marco just a few episodes ago. So we'll probably try to link to that too. So if you're interested in archeology in Iraq and this really old site called Lagash, which is the former name of the town, it's got a new name and I can't remember what the new name is in Iraq, but they call it something else now. But he's been working out there for a few seasons now and is more likely going back too.
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, they're doing some really cool work. So we thought this was the perfect opportunity to give your voice a break and let you learn some about what Paul is doing with the Lagash team out in Iraq. All right. I'm going to finish this cough drop and
Archaeotech Podcast Introduction with Chris Webster
00:03:05
Speaker
then maybe take a nap. Here is episode 191 of the archaeo tech podcast. We'll see you guys next week. Bye.
00:03:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 191. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we catch up with Paul after his two months doing fieldwork in Iraq. Let's get to it. Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how's it going, man? It feels like it's been forever.
Paul's Middle Eastern Travels and Archaeological Efforts
00:03:31
Speaker
Well, it has been forever. I've been traveling around the world around the Middle East about half the last year. I feel like I'm the world's worst co-host right now because I'm never, ever, ever around. But I'm back now. I've been back for just over a week from Iraq this time again and doing fine. It was a good trip. How have you been, Chris?
00:03:53
Speaker
I've been doing good and I have to argue with you being the world's worst co-host because you're out there just building content. That's what you're doing So, you know, I'm just over here like reading news articles, but you're you're doing archaeology and building content. So there you go We'll take it
00:04:10
Speaker
We're doing well. We're in, uh, North Carolina. And as we are the end of the year, the last three years, we spend it over here. Cause my wife's family is from
Chris's RV Adventure and Travel Plans
00:04:19
Speaker
Charlotte. So we spend that time. We spend the holidays out here and then we're headed back over the West coast and Southwest for the start of the new year. So that should be fun. And yeah, we're just enjoying life. I don't know. Did I, had I bought this new RV before you left? I don't know, but we, we swapped out our old RV and bought a new one. So I don't know if you knew that.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. The last time, well, maybe it was not the last time, but sometime this summer when we actually recorded together, you'd mentioned that. How's it going with it? You liking it? It's going great. Yeah, it's really awesome. It's a few inches shorter, but it's bigger inside because the slides go out further.
00:04:58
Speaker
It's got so many modern amenities, whereas the older one just did not. It was still hanging on to some old tech. This is a 2022, and not only is it a 2022, but they also just put in some more conveniences that we like and that we were wanting to do to the old one. Rather than upgrade all the systems on the old one, we just bought one with upgrades already installed.
00:05:22
Speaker
So there you go. So how many upgrades have you done to the new one so far? Any? Uh, yes. So we put some, we put some led lights underneath. I know. Uh, we put some led lights underneath, which actually not only just like
Fuel Costs and Transportation in Saudi Arabia
00:05:36
Speaker
looks cool, but also it actually helps with critters. In the last RV, we had mice inside occasionally at certain campgrounds cause they just find little holes and they get up inside and you put these led lights that can kind of glow and maybe even change colors a little bit overnight.
00:05:50
Speaker
And it looks neat underneath the RV. I'm not going to deny that, but also that light is critter deterrent. So that's really the primary reason behind that. But then we also had our lithium batteries from the old RV. We took those and we installed those just last week and took out the six lead acid batteries and put in our six lithium. So that's good.
00:06:11
Speaker
This RV actually came with 600 watts of solar on the roof and we're having another 800 watts installed on our way back to Arizona. There's an install place in Alabama that we're going to swing by and they're going to put that in. After that, I think we'll be done for a little while because we just wanted to get our solar and our batteries back up to where they were before so we can do some good boondocking.
00:06:32
Speaker
and then go from there. Because we're spending almost two months off grid for the most part in January and February, with some minor exceptions and some short park stays. But yeah, we're going to be in middle of nowhere Arizona for weeks in January. We're spending February in Mexico at a no services campground right on the Baja Peninsula, right at the north end of it on the water. But there's no services there whatsoever, so we're totally off grid.
00:06:59
Speaker
in that little campground. So yeah, it should be interesting to say the least. Well, it sounds like fun. I mean, congratulations on this. I was really wondering what you were doing about power
Archaeological Projects at Ur and Lagash
00:07:11
Speaker
because I knew you've spent so much time and effort and thought and care and money on beefing up the power on the old one. I was just abetting and all that. I know.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, we did bring some of it over. And it did feel hard to do all that, because we just did some of that back in April. But you know, like with all things, we hadn't really intended to buy this RV at the time we did. We had been looking at upgrading. But I don't know. In the end, it's a better choice, because now we can upgrade our vehicle as well, because this is a diesel RV with a 10,000 pound towing capacity.
00:07:43
Speaker
Whereas the other one was gas with a 5,000 pounds, so now we can upgrade that and get places that we can't go with our little car once we get something that's a little more robust. Yeah, I was astounded that that old one was gas. I was just really floored by that when I learned it.
00:07:59
Speaker
I know. It was shocking. It did
Preservation of Archaeological Sites
00:08:02
Speaker
all right. But yeah, this one just gets way better fuel efficiency on the diesel. Even though I buy the diesel right as gas prices drop through the floor, diesel basically stayed the same, if not went up. So that's awesome. But either way, we're getting way better gas mileage and more distance out of a tank than the old one. So I'll take it. It's between gas and diesel.
00:08:25
Speaker
When I was in Saudi this summer, between the first rotation and second rotation, we returned all the rental cars that we had and got new ones. We switched out from having a variety of different 4x4 SUVs that were all gas to having a Hilux that was a brand new one, this diesel. We had to break in the engine, which was fun doing that off-road. Mind you, gas prices in Saudi aren't in any way comparable to the
00:08:51
Speaker
I don't know what they are in the US, but the difference there was the gas ones, we were gassing up every day and a half for around 60 bucks. And we drove that brand new diesel for three days and then filled it up. I mean, it was on vapors at the end. We had like 11 kilometers left. We filled it up for $11. Oh my God.
00:09:13
Speaker
Nice. Three days for $11 versus day and a half for $60. That's pretty good. It was just shocking the difference. Yeah. Those Hiluxes are cool. That's a Toyota, right? And they don't sell it in this country. No, they don't sell them in the States, the closest to the Tacoma, but it's a slightly different frame, rather. Same basic idea. Basically, utilitarian pickup truck.
00:09:36
Speaker
But very nice and just a few little details that made it extra cool like the air conditioned seats. That is exactly what you want after a hard day of climbing up mountains in the desert.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah. Man, I've never had a field vehicle with air conditioned seats, but I have had field vehicles that had auto start and I would crank up the air conditioning when we shut off in the morning. And then as soon as I could see the vehicle, I started cranking up that auto start just to get the vehicle started and get that air conditioning started. That's the
Field Season Overview at Lagash
00:10:11
Speaker
best I've ever had. But air conditioned seats, I've never even, I've seen like
00:10:15
Speaker
you know, luxury vehicles and stuff with air conditioned seats, but I've never actually tried them. I was like, I understand how heated seats work, but the air conditioned seats, I guess it sounds like they work pretty well, don't they? Oh yeah. Incredibly comfortable. That's really cool. So all right. Well, you know what? This is going to be a little bit shorter episode. We're just catching up with Paul. Why don't we take a break right there and then we'll come back and talk about your recent time in the Middle East and how all that went. So we'll do that on the other side of the break.
00:10:40
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 191, where we reintroduce Paul as a co-host of the show, at least until the Springfield season. Yeah, otherwise known as car talk, I think. Right, right, exactly. So let's actually get into this, Paul. This wasn't a CRM project or anything like that, and you've done this project before. So let's just first tell everybody where you were and what kind of stuff you were working on for the last couple of months.
Archaeological Discoveries at Ur
00:11:08
Speaker
All right. Well, longtime listeners will know that as of last year, I switched out of my IT job and went back into field archaeology. And one of the first gigs I had was I went in November of 2021 to Iraq for a couple of weeks. And I've stuck on that project since. That was the Lagash archaeological project.
00:11:29
Speaker
And we had a spring season. So I was there for five weeks, I think, in the spring. And now we've had our third season this fall. And I just got back. We're recording this in early December. And I just got back about a week and a half ago. This one was interesting, though. The project is by the University of Pennsylvania. And Penn also has the permit to the site of Ur. So the Ur project was also now getting off the ground.
00:11:56
Speaker
So I went first to Ur and worked there for a month before just moving up the street a little bit to Lagash and working there for just over a month. So I got two projects under my belt in Iraq this last stint. That's really awesome. So we've talked about Lagash quite a bit. What were they doing over in Ur?
00:12:15
Speaker
So the project in some ways is taking over from the old SUNY Stony Brook project under Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zwabanski. We were working in one of their trenches, a deep trench that had been opened I think in 2015 originally, maybe 2017. Anyhow, it's been sitting there open and unfinished since 2019, which was last season, and then everything went to hell with COVID.
00:12:42
Speaker
So, we dug in that until it was too deep to safely dig anymore, so we stopped that one. We were hoping to get down to Akkadian levels, but I don't think we did. I have to talk to the field director to find out if we actually, you know, how deep we got, but I think that we only got into or three levels. We also opened up a couple new trenches on a small tell that sits, a low tell that sits a little bit to the east of the main mound of ore.
00:13:11
Speaker
So we're looking at architecture in both those trenches. And then in the trench that I was in, we were also looking primarily for architecture. But because we were down so deep and by down so deep, I mean, we were eight meters deep at the end of this project. Wow.
00:13:26
Speaker
just stepped it in so many times and it was a very small area. So the architecture we found was part of a wall. We couldn't tell anything about floor plan. There was also a long, under the same permit, there's a German team that was working on, for lack of a better term, a villa, a very large house out on the
00:13:46
Speaker
outskirts of the tell itself of the or three town, but still within the city walls. And they found some very interesting things and they were doing an expansive excavation so they could actually see the entire floor plan of the building and see its various changes over time of that house.
00:14:04
Speaker
It was a variety of different things. It was mostly just to tie up some loose ends from the previous project and to get this new permit, this new project from Penn up and running. I'm curious, in a place like Iraq, and maybe you don't know the answer to this, but
00:14:24
Speaker
These projects, they're academic projects. People are over there doing research. But what happens when all that's done and the buildings are exposed? If there are buildings or something like that, it's not just artifact collection that you can
00:14:39
Speaker
there's no danger or anything there. But if buildings are exposed and you're like, got this whole thing opened up, you see pictures like that all the time from Middle Eastern excavations. But what happens after that is, is some local municipality forced to essentially take care of that now? Or does it get reburied or does, you know, some national museum take care of it? Or do
Magnetometry in Archaeology
00:14:59
Speaker
you have to have all that in place before you even decide to do that? You have to have who's going to be the custodian of this once we're done.
00:15:05
Speaker
No, it's not formalized, but there is a general sense of best practices and we're trying to adhere to them. We weren't able to adhere to them in the 2019 project because there was the expectation that they'd be back the following year and be able to continue working those trenches.
00:15:21
Speaker
We decommissioned a number of trenches at the end of this season. The one that I was working in, that eight meter deep one, we decommissioned as well as a couple others that had been left open from the previous project. Even the one that I don't think they're finished with it, I should talk to the excavators who were working on it, but even that villa was covered at the end. What we did is we put down some bio fabric.
00:15:45
Speaker
on top of the extant walls and then backfilled in order to protect what's remaining of the walls. And that's what we need to do. We need to do that for preservation of the archaeology, especially when you're digging mud brick. The elements will degrade the material, right? So you leave something out for a few years and it dissolves.
00:16:07
Speaker
So, we didn't want that to happen. It's a little different at ore where a lot of the architecture is baked brick. But we still have to care for it. And it's sitting on top, sometimes it's pedestaled, sometimes it's built on top of pre-existing mud brick walls. So, we wanted to shore it up and protect it in a way that would keep it from crumbling as much as possible, but would also make it that if somebody were to re-excavate this 50 years from now, they'd get down, they'd hit the plastic layer, and they'd know exactly where we'd gotten to.
00:16:37
Speaker
Nice. This is a little different. With Lagash, we had a similar set of issues, but Lagash, we have no bake brick at all. It's all entirely mud brick. We covered with plastic and with soil and sandbags at the end of last season in the spring, our trenches that we opened. The one that was covered the best
00:17:03
Speaker
was preserved very nicely. A couple others that we didn't have enough soil on, the tarps that we'd put down there were already shredded in just a few months. Between the sun and the wind and the elements, it just tore apart those tarps.
00:17:21
Speaker
moderate damage i wouldn't say significant but it had been a year between the projects i would have been significant so at the end of the logash project we did is we went and put two layers of plastic down. Different kinds of plastic clear plastic first and then tarps on top of it and also use sandbags to shore things up
00:17:40
Speaker
And soil on top of that, and hopefully that'll preserve it. Because Lagash, this last year was a two-season year, but that was only because we couldn't work there because of COVID. The project was open in 2019. So we wanted to make up for some lost time.
00:17:59
Speaker
But going forward, it's going to be a one season, a year project. So we won't be back excavating those same trenches until October, probably of 2023.
Data Processing Challenges in Archaeology
00:18:10
Speaker
And we want to make sure that we don't have too much damage to the architecture that we've left in place.
00:18:15
Speaker
Right. Right. Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about this field season. So did you, I can't remember leading up to this, but were any, you know, just focusing on the fact that this is the archaeo tech podcast, we could go into all kinds of stuff, but trying to stay on brand here, were any new technologies or devices or anything like that introduced in this fall field season?
00:18:39
Speaker
No new technologies, and I'm going to be talking about Logosh almost exclusively from here on out, even though Ur is a phenomenal site. Logosh is the one that is a project that I'm more closely tied to. No new technologies, but a new to me technology, and that is magnetometry, and we talked about that a little bit in the summer or early fall because I've done some training.
00:19:02
Speaker
in order to come up with a plan for how we're going to do the magnetometry. Now, magnetometry was done on the project in 2019, but we have a new setup, new gear, and a new person doing it, that person being me. So we went out there into the field with this new equipment, and then I got to deploy it on a survey that designed and integrate it with the pre-existing magnetometry data.
00:19:29
Speaker
Okay. All right. I want to talk about that in the third segment and how that worked out compared to the previous results and the previous magnetometry data. Along those lines, have you made any adjustments? I'm just curious because people thinking about projects like this, especially projects in far off areas where you may not have
00:19:49
Speaker
the access to things like you would maybe say at your home state if you're in this country or even another country at a bigger city. Maybe you don't have access to certain things, but your photo management and all that stuff, have you made any adjustments to those workflows that benefited you guys in this project as far as just overall data management goes? Yeah, we didn't actually have to
00:20:11
Speaker
do any major changes this time because it's only been a few months since the previous season. So we had a good sense of what worked and what didn't. There were some tweaks to how we do things, but no major revampings. But like I said, I had the magnetometry that I had to integrate with previous magnetometry, which was done by somebody else using a different system.
00:20:32
Speaker
And we completed the surface survey that I designed and had spoken about last time. We got 60% of the site covered in the spring and we finished the remaining 40% this last season. So now I have to process the data. But from my point of view, it was very similar. The one thing, since you're mentioning being stateside or not being stateside, I had
00:20:57
Speaker
last time purchased a FLIR Boson thermal imaging camera to attach to our drone to get some drone aerial thermal photographs. And I had a lot of trouble with it in the spring because the gimbal assembly wasn't balanced properly for that tiny camera.
00:21:17
Speaker
So I made this wonky sort of counterbalance with some wire that I found and I glued it into a AA battery that offset the weight properly and it was really ugly. And it was twitchy and it didn't work very well.
00:21:36
Speaker
The gimbal assembly is controlled by a regular radio control like you might have for a radio control car or radio control airplane in order to make it look the direction that we wanted. The direction that we wanted is straight down, of course. The radio in that would interfere with the radio for controlling the drone. So it would get up 20, 30 meters and then lose connection and the drone would force land.
00:22:00
Speaker
So I redesigned the gimbal assembly, 3D printed some parts to make the balance better. I had that all working, I recalibrated everything. It was all set to go. And I got out in the field, I did one flight, still had the problem with the radio interference, decided I was going to try a different setup, got it so that it wouldn't interfere as badly, and then went to flight and the radio controller wouldn't work anymore.
00:22:29
Speaker
Oh my god. The power on it had burnt out. So I googling, googling, googling. I find that this is a common problem with this particular one that we purchased, that it burns out. And the solution is really simple. All you have to do is find a voltage controller and solder it in. Oh yeah, no problem.
00:22:46
Speaker
Of course, a voltage regulator is not something that I was going to find stuck on a farm with no permission to go anywhere except for the site. Yeah, it just wasn't. Amazon doesn't deliver that? Having to forego that. No, no. It's a little surprising, but their drones don't reach there yet.
00:23:09
Speaker
Yeah, so I ended up having to reconfigure that so that I could basically fix that camera facing straight down all the time without the use of the remote controller. I got that to work and I started to get some results at the end by ran out of time.
00:23:27
Speaker
So I was hoping to leave all that equipment in the field and instead it's all in my basement and I've got another round of soldering and programming and 3D printing and I'm going to pretend that I hate doing this. Right, exactly.
00:23:43
Speaker
All right. Well, I really want to talk about the magnetometry stuff because that's just, to be honest, it's not something you do very often, especially in CRM archaeology and stuff like that that I'm more familiar with. So I want to talk about that a lot more. We'll do that on the other side of the break. Back in a minute.
00:24:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archetech podcast, episode 191. We're catching up with Paul after his couple months of field work over in the Middle East, in Iraq, more specifically. And Paul, you mentioned a few times. We talked about it before you went, that you took some magnetometry training. And I'm really interested in this, because I haven't used a magnetometer for 12 years since I was in grad school. So I'm sure the principal hasn't really changed, obviously. But I'm sure the technology has changed for how all this works. And you mentioned
00:24:28
Speaker
having to process the results and all that, and we'll talk about that. But I'm curious as to how you think your survey methodology came out. I remember seeing the magnetometer has different stabilizing poles and stuff like that, right? And they make these little holes. So I remember seeing a picture you put on Twitter of the grid of holes from a drone shot from doing the magnetometry survey, which was kind of cool. Those holes? Those holes?
00:24:55
Speaker
are my footprints. The whole pin striking image is the two tracks are the wheels on the cart for the magnetometer and those holes in the middle are my footprints. So basically what I had done is I divided up our site into 45 meter square grid.
00:25:15
Speaker
I positioned it so that it would line up with our trenches in a way that meant that I had as many grid squares as possible without having to work around our existing trenches.
00:25:30
Speaker
The reason why I did 45 meters, and I mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again because I think it's worthwhile for people to hear, is that we had three sensors on our cart. It's a one-meter wide cart, and there's a sensor each 50 centimeters. One on the left, one in the middle, one on the right, each of them 50 centimeters from the next.
00:25:52
Speaker
It turns out that on a zigzag Pustrophodon-style pattern going across these grid units, that the width of the grid unit has to be evenly divisible by the number of sensors that you have.
Design and Planning of Magnetometry Surveys
00:26:05
Speaker
I have three sensors. I want to do a 50-meter grid, but I can't do that.
00:26:11
Speaker
So, my options were 45, 48 or well, 60 would be the next sensible one up. 48 doesn't make a lot of sense because if I go to a five sensor grid, 48 isn't even visible by five. 45 worked and 60 would work. And I went with 45 because I have 50 meter tapes.
00:26:35
Speaker
I didn't have to lug along 100 meter tapes or something else to do it. So it was limited by that. It doesn't really matter a whole lot, but that's why I went with 45 meter grid, which is kind of weird sounding, but it makes sense once it's explained. And I'm going to put another plug in on my GitHub page. I wrote a little script that anybody can download and look at that will do those calculations for you. I'll tell you what your center line should be, what your first and last sensor should be.
00:27:02
Speaker
if you input the width of the grid and the number of sensors and the width of the cart that you're using. It'll calculate all that for you so you can help plan.
00:27:10
Speaker
Okay. So yeah, so I would just choose a grid unit and then with the total station, we would lay out the corners of the grid and I would lay the tapes out of baseline east to west on the south and another one east to west on the north. And then the way that I was taught, I mean, I've done GPR magnetometry where you pull a rope or a chain or a tape
00:27:35
Speaker
north-south from the baseline to the end line, and then you follow that to guide you to keep you going straight. And then if you're using a system that has a trigger that you have to press manually, you press it every one meter or every whatever the interval is. The system that we had had an odometer on the cart, so I didn't have to worry about pressing a trigger. The odometer would do that automatically.
00:27:59
Speaker
But I did still have to worry about going straight. Instead of drawing that chain north-south as a guide, what I was taught, and this worked beautifully, is I could place a traffic cone center line of the target on the north line and then one on the south line.
00:28:19
Speaker
each time. So I'd aim at the traffic cone and when I got there, I would move the traffic cone a couple meters over and turn around and come back and move that traffic cone a couple meters over and I would just do that back and forth moving the traffic cone. And it worked great for me because what this meant was normally you have to have two or more people for a survey like this because you've got people that are moving the chains. Aside from laying out the grid units, the corners,
00:28:45
Speaker
where I needed somebody running the total station and I was running the poll and staking, I was doing it all by myself. There were a couple times that people helped me and I certainly, it sped things up a little when they helped me, but it was not necessary to do this work.
00:29:00
Speaker
And so that made it a one person job for the most part. And we got to the end, we got a DGPS with the trimble corrections. And that meant that I could actually lay out those corners in a couple areas. So we did some tests around the site all by myself.
00:29:17
Speaker
took longer than it does with the total station, but it was then entirely start to finish a one-person job. Yeah. Nice. Well, then that's really cool when you've got obviously a limited crew and you can't just call somebody and say, hey, can you come help with this? So making that, even if it takes you just a little bit longer, it's still way more efficient in this scenario. So I'm also wondering,
00:29:41
Speaker
So you mentioned that they did a magnetometry survey back in 2019 on this area. Did you survey the exact same area on Lagash? No, I planned mine so that, I mean, the grid that I drew up covers the entire site, including the areas that had previously been surveyed. But I planned it so that I would do ones that were complementary, that hadn't overlapped with the other ones. It turned out that that 2019 stuff had a significant spatial error.
00:30:10
Speaker
Oh, really? I found the error. Yeah. And I corrected it. I corrected all that 2019 data. And once I did so, it lined up beautifully with not just my data because, you know, then I'm using my as a reference and
00:30:26
Speaker
Well, who's to say which is more accurate? But it also lined up with what we were finding in our excavations, which we weren't finding in the spring, which was baffling to us why we had this beautiful magnetometry that looked like we could see features.
Integrating New and Old Magnetometry Data
00:30:39
Speaker
But then when we dug, they weren't showing up in the same place. Well, it turns out because they were 20 meters over.
00:30:46
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So did they end up, I mean, even though they had this spatial error, did they find anything in 2019 of any significance? Uh, they did. And there is a, uh, an article that's making the rounds right now about, uh, worked on at Lagash that relies in part on this really badly botched.
00:31:05
Speaker
magnetometry from 2019. I rectified it and so basically doubled the footprint of what we had here. The 2019 data plus mine and things line up beautifully. Streets and walls that you can see in the 2019 data.
00:31:25
Speaker
go off the edge of the 2019 data and right into my 2022 data, perfectly in alignment. Then there's a trench and you can see where the street is. In the trench, we excavated and we found it in excavation. For our purposes, it's really proving to be incredibly valuable for predicting what we're going to find subsurface.
00:31:45
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I'll tell you a little example. So we had a student, an undergrad that was on the project, and she had very little field experience. She would actually I, and there's something else I'm going to want to talk about at some point is my program that I've hinted at for a long, long time about my total station program, I finally got it up and running well enough that I dog fooded it for both these projects for or and for Lagash, and made a whole bunch of little like interface tweaks as I went.
00:32:13
Speaker
to make it easier to use in the field. I taught this undergrad how to use it, and she became our total station person. I was training her one day. I was like, well, let's go. We're going to open a trench in this area. Why don't you go with the total station? We'll have you. I was running the total station there because I was still tweaking some of the interface things.
00:32:38
Speaker
But I gave her the pole, and again, very little field experience. I said, find everything that you think looks interesting on the surface here. So if you see a bunch of pottery, if you see a ring of something, then tell me what you think it might be. The rings are going to be drains. The piles of pottery are just going to be piles. And so she went and she tagged all these different areas. She's like, here's a concentration of pottery. Here looks like a drain. Here is some dark soil that looks kind of ashy.
00:33:04
Speaker
And then we ran the magnetometry over it. And what she picked out on the surface and what we found on the magnetometry were matched exactly. It was beautiful. Nice. And then we excavated it. It matched even better. Oh, you found that ashy bit. Guess what we found here? We've got an oven.
00:33:25
Speaker
that's really cool. Anytime you get that kind of correlation, it's just a magical vindication of everything you've been trying to do. I'm curious as well. It's been a long time since I saw magnetometry data. You mentioned at the beginning of this conversation that you still have to process all the results and really figure out what you have going on. But out in the field,
00:33:47
Speaker
Do you get, what kind of indication do you get just from the results you're getting in the field with, well first off, can you tell anything as you're out there actually running the equipment or do you start maybe getting a hint at some stuff once you bring it back in and toss it all on the computer without like full processing but maybe minimal processing. How much can you tell out there is what I'm kind of getting in.
00:34:09
Speaker
All right. I think these are conflating two different things. The survey that still needs processing is my systematic surface collection that I started before. The data that we have for the magnetometry were processed nightly when we were in the field. Actually, the data collection happens now with the system that we're using on holding it in front of me, a Panasonic ToughPad FZG1. It's basically a Windows computer in a tablet form.
00:34:39
Speaker
And the data collection software does not show you what, for this particular system, the census system, does not show you what you're seeing under the ground. But as soon as you're done with any one of the units, you hit done and then just open up a different program and process the data right there. It takes just a second to import it. Oh, wow.
00:34:59
Speaker
to a median correction on it and then adjust the values that you're showing and boom, you could see it right there. So within minutes of me finishing a unit, I could look at the data that I just collected. And so sometimes we've done that. There wasn't any real point for me doing that for the most part, but there were a couple of days that we had visitors on site and they saw me out there with Bessie. Bessie is what I'm calling the cart because it's black and white and I'm plowing this field. It reminds me of a cow.
00:35:29
Speaker
Nice. I'm out there with Bessie and then I finish up and I can quickly process it as I'm walking back towards the visitors and I can show them exactly what I had just picked up by some surface 15 minutes ago. That's really cool.
00:35:45
Speaker
It's not real time, but it's close enough that for our purposes, we can definitely use it in the field and see the results right there, maybe during break or something. The only caveat to that is the software that we're using runs with a hardware dongle. If I wanted to do that on any particular day, I'd have to remember to bring the hardware dongle with me. The fear then is losing the dongle somewhere out in the field.
00:36:12
Speaker
So I don't know that I'd always recommend that, but it worked in those cases where I had to do so. Nice. All right. Well, I think that's good enough for now on this episode. We just wanted to have a quick catch up with you and see what was going on.
00:36:27
Speaker
an interview coming up and with actually somebody you worked with out on one of these projects and we've got some more good episodes and some stuff planned. We're going to get back on track. We got off track for a few reasons. A, Paul being gone and B, we did the October shutdown on new episodes and we've had some
00:36:49
Speaker
some times getting back in. Plus, we moved the APN onto a completely different hosting service in the last couple of weeks. That's been really fun. So aside from all that, I think we're getting back into it. And yeah, it's just been a lot. So it's been a fall for sure. And the APN turned eight on December 1. So we are now eight years old officially as a network, which is pretty cool.
00:37:12
Speaker
So anyway, Paul, any last parting thoughts on your Lagash fieldwork to sum up your time out there? It was excellent. I'm glad I went. I'm glad to be part of this project. I can't wait to go back again next year. We have a lot of interesting ideas that we're working on. Things are starting to gel in terms of how we understand
00:37:33
Speaker
The history of the site, what we understand about the topography, how we've matched up different data sets between the soil cores and the thermal imaging and the excavation and the magnetometry and the aerial survey. Even just like I was noticing during the magnetometry that some of the gullies on the side of the mounds on the tell seem to follow the ancient roads subsurface.
00:37:59
Speaker
I guess makes sense to some extent, but we didn't expect that. It's not everything. Not every gully follows a road, but it's common enough and we didn't know that before. We realized that as we were doing it and that's one of the things that I really miss about doing the field work is that we're there talking about this stuff, immersed in it with our colleagues day in and day out and you get a bit of a feel for something and you
Future of Machine Learning in Archaeology
00:38:24
Speaker
chew the fat with them and maul some ideas over and some of them end up in the circular bin. But some of them actually seem to bear fruit, some of them bear a little more looking into, oh, that's the other thing with the magnetometry data.
00:38:40
Speaker
The magnetometry data, we have distinct signatures that we can eyeball. So I can look at something, I can tell you it's a wall, it's a mud brick wall. I can look at something and tell you it's a kiln. I can look at something and tell you it's a street. What I want to do is actually formalize that. So we're starting conversations with somebody that can do a little bit of machine learning, a little bit of computer vision to help
00:39:02
Speaker
define these patterns, the things that we're picking up intuitively, but then look at the difference in the levels and shapes and juxtapositions of highs and lows to try to formalize and regularize that and then let the computers do it for us as maybe a first pass through to say, hey, this looks like it's a road. Hey, this looks like it's a wall. Hey, this looks like it's a kiln. Hey, this looks like it's an oven. This looks like it's a drain. And then maybe other features that we haven't yet been able to identify.
00:39:28
Speaker
So we're going to be exploring other post-processing sorts of techniques like that that I think will be pretty exciting.
00:39:37
Speaker
Okay, cool. Well, that is pretty exciting. Definitely interested in hearing more about that. So all right, Paul. Well, with that, I think we'll go ahead and head out for this episode and thanks for, thanks for coming back and bringing back all kinds of good information. And we will come back next time with some, some more great stuff. I think that episode's coming out right before Christmas. So at least here in the United States. And if you're, I don't know, celebrate Christmas.
00:40:03
Speaker
If not, it comes out right before any other weekend. So there you go. All right. Well, thanks everybody. And again, we'll see you next time. Thanks, Paul. Thanks. Take care.
00:40:19
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:40:42
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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 chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.