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Paleoimaging with James Elliott - Ep 171
446 Plays3 years ago
We've talked extensively about non-destructive techniques for looking into the ground. But, what about this human body or ancient collections? What about other materials? Our guest this week talks about the use of x-rays and other similar technologies in archaeology and how they're used to look inside ancient remains and artifacts to determine what's inside, how's it made, and in the case of bones, pathology and other indicators.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 171. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss archaeological radiography with James Elliott. Let's get to it.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hey, everybody. Here's a little biography of our guest before we start the show. James Elliott is a lecturer in diagnostic radiography at Canterbury Christ Church University in the United Kingdom and a qualified archaeologist. He has a master's in forensic radiography and enjoys researching and the use of x-rays in archaeology with his research website, paleoimaging.com.
Host Updates and Guest Introduction
00:00:54
Speaker
And you can find that link in the show notes. On to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Archaeotech podcast. Paul, how's it going?
00:01:01
Speaker
It's going all right. Not a whole lot new to report this time. Just spent a lot of time over the last week or so doing a fair amount of GIS work for an NSF grant proposal that I'm getting written into. But aside from that, I don't think I have anything really to chat about today. How are you doing? Where are you now?
00:01:18
Speaker
Well, we are actually, and our guests can appreciate this, we are in Lake Havasu City, Arizona at an RVing event, our first ever RVing rally, so to speak, where they're doing talks and all kinds of stuff. And it's been really, really, really fun. Because from a tech standpoint, you know this because you worked with us over the summer. We had solar panels installed on the roof and lithium batteries. Well, there's different sections of RVers here. And we are down in the solar section where you're not allowed to run your generator or your engine.
00:01:46
Speaker
You have to have good power management or a lot of solar energy, and we've been doing pretty good. We're on day five or six, I think, and I think we got here Saturday, and we haven't run our generator once, but we've had to have some pretty strict power management practices to be able to do that. So it's been fun. It's been fun. I'm just glad to say that I have a number of high amp batteries in order to run some things, because we charge those up when we do have good battery power.
00:02:13
Speaker
And then overnight and stuff, we can keep our phones on those other batteries that we use in the field.
History of London Bridge in Arizona
00:02:19
Speaker
So it's been interesting. Yeah. We got a few more days to go too. And I said our guest would be able to appreciate this because about five miles away from me is the London Bridge. The London Bridge that was built
00:02:33
Speaker
The London Bridge that was built in the, I think it was the early, like 1830s or something like that. And they tore down the 600 year old medieval bridge to build that bridge because it wasn't adequate anymore. And then in the mid 20th century, the London City Council was like, well, we need a new bridge because cars are a thing now. And we didn't really plan on that when we built this in the 1800s. So we need to structurally just rebuild this whole entire thing. And one of the city council people said, why don't we sell it?
00:03:02
Speaker
Like, you're crazy. Who's going to buy that? Well, an American businessman from Missouri was crazy enough to buy it. He spent $2.5 million on the London Bridge and they marked every stone so they could put it back together. They dismantled the London Bridge. They cut off about six to eight inches of the facing on it to basically refresh the granite.
00:03:20
Speaker
and then shipped it over to Long Beach through the Panama Canal, trucked it over to Arizona, and basically put it around. They faced an iron girder bridge, so it's a really sturdy bridge, but it's got the London Bridge blocks surrounding it, and it's a super cool little area down there, crossing a man-made channel that they made basically just to put this bridge over.
00:03:45
Speaker
It's really interesting seeing that. That was pretty fun. Leading into that, let me introduce our guest, James Elliott, who is, as I mentioned in the introduction, a lecturer in diagnostic radiography.
James Elliott's Career Journey
00:03:57
Speaker
James, welcome to the show.
00:03:58
Speaker
Hi there. This is great to be with you guys. I've been listening for a long time. So thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, we really appreciate it. Yeah. And this is especially cool because most of the time we get people on the show that are, well, I hate to put it bluntly, but archaeologists, right, that are using some sort of technology to do something. And, you know, your background is in education, is not really in archaeology originally, right? So let's talk about how
00:04:27
Speaker
you got into archaeology, how you got interested in that, and then how that led to radiography. And then we'll talk about that later. Sure, sure. Well, I hate to break it to you, but actually, I did start out in archaeology. I did a degree in archaeology at Newcastle University quite some time ago, qualified back in 2001. That's right. 2004, sorry. And then, yeah, I had real
00:04:52
Speaker
difficulties getting employment. So I looked at what other jobs that are out there and I looked into healthcare. And in healthcare at that time in the UK, they were offering free pass for the tuition fees for radiography. So I thought, you know what, this is probably a good stable job. I went into that, started working down in the south of England.
00:05:17
Speaker
But I always had that interest in archaeology. And so with the radiography, we do use x-rays in archaeology, don't we? So I started putting the two together. And eventually I did a Masters in Forensic Radiography, learning about how to use imaging to
00:05:35
Speaker
identify the deceased or look at objects, non-destructive testing and then eventually the long winding road that is life. I found myself working at Canterbury Christ Church University and now I'm really getting to my fore to research how x-rays and radiography is used in archaeology.
00:05:54
Speaker
So in this podcast, we of course like to unpack any terminology that ourselves and possibly the listeners are not aware of. So let's talk about radiography because that's what this whole podcast is going to be about. Can you explain to us what that is and what it's used for typically?
Radiography in Archaeology
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, sure. It's my day job at the moment. Teaching people to become radiographers. The people come off the street and they do three years and then they get their degree and they start providing medical care in our NHS. You don't have three years, you've got three minutes. Go.
00:06:29
Speaker
So radiography is the use of medical imaging in healthcare. And although there's also radiotherapy with therapeutic radiographers, unlike me, I'm diagnostic radiographer. In the UK, a radiographer is a protected title, meaning you can't call yourself one without doing a degree first and being registered. And so this involves all sorts of different types of technologies, not just x-ray, you've got CT scans and MRI and nuclear medicine and ultrasound.
00:06:56
Speaker
And my area of, uh, specialism in the NHS and the national health service is actually nuclear medicines where you inject patients with radiation. And then you kind of measure that with a gamma camera to find out about them normally about how an organ works. So it's a big area. It's a big topic. Nice. Nice. So basically anything you can use to look inside the human body without cutting them open. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:21
Speaker
They say that 99% of the population will have imaging at some point in their life. I was just wondering who that one percent is because everyone at some point in their life will have some form of imaging and come into radiology department. Yeah, you would think. I think I had an x-ray last year. Okay. Well, how did that all swing back around into archaeology then?
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, interesting, because I wanted to do archaeology, but it was more of a hobby. And then when I came into uni and had the obligation to do research, I thought, let's start collaborating with the archaeology guys. And then
00:08:03
Speaker
We went together to do teaching for the undergrad to show how x-rays are being used, and we started doing projects together. And that's really where I've gone now, sort of looking at how x-rays are used in archaeology with bones, with metal work, and ceramics. Interesting. On the bio that you sent us, you have a link to your website, paleoimaging.com. And I went there, and you've got a lot of interesting information there, including a class, so we'll definitely put a link in their show notes for that.
00:08:32
Speaker
But you also have a description on the webpage about the use of the term paleoimaging. And I was hoping that you could explain for us and for the listeners what you mean by paleoimaging and then how this radiography works within that overall term.
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, paleoimaging. I've stolen from Beckett and Conlog. They did the old mummy roadshow, didn't they? Which is a show that was on National Geographic that went all around America, scanning mummies and x-raying mummies and stuff. And they wrote a book and in that book it says paleoimaging has been defined as the capture of images of cultural remains and artifacts
00:09:12
Speaker
where for me it's a multitude of different imaging technologies are used non-destructively to gain information and yeah on the website I've got a little bit that says what is paleoimaging and it says that there are different types of imaging you can use. You can use x-phase or you can use computer tomography which is essentially taking an x-ray round to the circle
00:09:34
Speaker
and then using computing power to reconstruct images. Or you can use MRI, which is magnetic resonance imaging. But you've also got philosophy, and it's very basic. You know, paleo imaging can include just using a camera. A camera, aerial photography, ground penetrating radar. There's a vast array of different things out there, which I would consider to be within the bracket, the research fields of paleo
Teaching Paleoimaging and X-Ray Techniques
00:10:00
Speaker
imaging.
00:10:00
Speaker
So, broadly speaking then, paleoimaging could encompass any kind of imaging techniques within archaeology. And I guess to a greater or lesser extent, all of us, archaeologists, regardless of our specialty, or almost all of us, are doing some form of paleoimaging. But again, back to what you're doing, you're especially specializing in x-rays, both as a practitioner of archaeo-paleoimaging and also then as a teacher of
00:10:29
Speaker
Could you give us the quick elevator speech of what you're doing teaching paleoimaging, what you're doing about teaching radiography to other archaeologists or for archaeological purposes? Yeah, that's a good question. So x-rays have many benefits, which I tell to the undergrad students and I help out with some of the PhD students. It's non-destructive, non-invasive. When you use x-rays, you're not going to destroy the item and you don't have to shove anything inside it. So it's non-invasive.
00:10:59
Speaker
There have been studies that looked into the effect of x-rays with DNA, ancient DNA, and to get to the stage where you're going to be destroying ancient DNA, you've got to be doing something incredible. Like, this is the Hulk kind of style of gamma rays, x-rays getting through that item. So x-rays, just general x-rays, like your chest x-ray you had, Chris, that would not destroy the ancient DNA within some bones.
00:11:24
Speaker
So you have that ability to explore the inner structure, the inner structure of an item. But there's different way they have to get your head around it. Our next phase is a 2d representation of a 3d object. So that's where the radiographic science comes in.
00:11:39
Speaker
Okay. So am I right then because you anticipated one of the questions that I asked that put on our show notes for Chris. In medical applications, we're worried about getting too many x-rays in a given year, for example, because of the cancer risk. And what you're saying is that destroying the object or mummy or whatever you're looking at that is non-living, we don't have any similar sorts of worries. You're not going to destroy that ancient DNA that we might want to extract otherwise.
00:12:05
Speaker
You know, yeah, even with this, like, we do CT scans of mummies, don't we? I've done one quite recently on a mummy head from Canterbury Museums and Galleries down in Kent. Yeah, great fun. Yeah, I've got some pictures and there's some more stuff going on the website soon.
00:12:22
Speaker
even without what I call a full fat version of that CT, the smallest resolution, the highest amount of dose we can give is nowhere near, nowhere near the amounts you would need to give to demonstrate damage to DNA. There's been a few studies on it. Fascinating. I've always wondered.
00:12:39
Speaker
But with living people, that's not the case. As radiographers in the UK, we would have to vet every x-ray request that comes through us to say, yes, this is justified and we are willing to do this for this patient because people do ask for x-rays that are either unnecessary or undiagnostic.
00:12:59
Speaker
That leads me to a thought too, because anytime I'm a field archaeologist and anytime we talk about some sort of technology, I'm always concerned with data collection and how we can best collect a piece of data or something like that in order to be able to study it in a certain way and not damage it for that future potential. So are there any concerns with field archaeologists collecting certain things, having to collect them in a certain way, being careful of certain practices that would
00:13:26
Speaker
I guess decrease your ability to collect information from some sort of radiographic method. Well, we, I've had quite a few requests to have soil blocks X-rayed and I've done a fair few and there's a perception by some archeologists that you can X-ray anything and sure enough with the power machine you could, but with the stuff I've got, I mean, it goes pretty high. We've got clinical equipment at Canterbury Uni and that, that gets through a lot of heavy, heavy stuff, but
00:13:56
Speaker
When you get to really heavy metals, you're going to struggle, you have to switch over to an industrial unit of some sort, which we don't have, but do exist, they are around. For the point of view of like, could you do anything wrong to an item? I think with the careful nature of any archaeologist, apart from a spade through something perhaps or a fork through something, you can't do too wrong for it to be amenable to get to x-ray and get a good result.
Challenges in Archaeological X-Ray Use
00:14:23
Speaker
There's a saying in radiography which says, one view is one view too few. Meaning that if you take an x-ray from one angle, you need to take another one from 90 degrees for it to mean anything because you need to be able to see the anatomy. In this case, it could be an object. It could be the internal structure from a different perspective to be able to really understand it.
00:14:43
Speaker
That answers the question I was thinking about because I didn't even think about x-raying soil blocks or something like that and thinking, I guess the more power you have, the deeper you can see or the more you can see through, I should say. But I was wondering, if you just have one image straight down into the soil, you're probably not even going to be able to tell what you're looking at unless you take an off-axis image and then
00:15:02
Speaker
you can compare those two and then start matching things up and say, well, here's this. Because you might see a dense object at 10 centimeters and a dense object at 30 centimeters. But in the X-ray, they might look like they're just in the same spot because of the nature of the two-dimensional representation.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. And also you have to think that in out in the field, the thing that you're going to be x-raying is going to be on top of a detector. So you can't you couldn't literally have it pointing at the ground, then see into the ground, because you need to have the film or whatever underneath it. But having said that, there are examples in literature about items being lifted as a block because they're so fragile that they need to be imaged as they are, especially there's Egyptian items that have been done like that. And then they've been
00:15:47
Speaker
a micro excavator to get rid of all the soil and the x-ray or ct the ironic thing is that sometimes with some situations you might want to perform imaging to prove that whatever the item was was broken before you touched it there's
00:16:03
Speaker
I know, yeah. Again, sort of back in Conlog, in one of their texts, they say that they went to x-ray some old priests or something standing up there in the church, mummified priests. And one way of saying that, you know, it wasn't me that broke them is you take an x-ray first as that permanent record. And thinking that idea of permanent record really resounds with archaeologists because they, you know, they like to documents. And that's one way of doing it.
00:16:30
Speaker
Nice. Well, that is a good spot to take our first break and we'll be back on the other side to talk more radiography with James Elliott back in a minute. Chris Webster here for the archaeology podcast network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
00:16:57
Speaker
Zencaster allows us to record high-quality audio with no stress on the guest. Just send them a link to click on and that's it. Zencaster does the rest. They even do automatic transcriptions. Check out the link in the show notes for 30% off your first three months or go to zencastr.com and use the code ARCHEOTECH. That's A-R-C-H-A-E-O-T-E-C-H.
00:17:20
Speaker
Looking to expand your knowledge of x-rays and imaging in the archaeology field? Then check out An Introduction to Paleoradiography, a short online course offering professional training for archaeologists and affiliated disciplines. Created by archaeologist, radiographer, and lecturer James Elliott, the content of this course is based upon his research and teaching experience in higher education. It is approved by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists as four hours of training. That's in the UK for those of you that don't know.
00:17:45
Speaker
So, don't miss out on this exciting opportunity for professional and personal development. For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P-A-L-E-O, imaging.com. And look for the link in the show notes to this episode.
00:18:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 171. We were talking with James Elliott all the way over in the UK about radiography and its use in archaeology. When we ended the last segment, we were talking about a few soil blocks and things like that. You mentioned a piece of equipment. That made me think every time I've had an X-ray,
00:18:20
Speaker
it's been like in a room with a big thing that is not going anywhere. And the technician goes in another room, puts on, I'm wearing a lead jacket. So what are the field applications of any of this? Or are there field applications for some of these radiographic methods? Are there handheld devices or ways you can set something up that you can use this in the field? Or do you have to, you mentioned getting dirt out from around from like a mummy or sarcophagus or something like that, implying that perhaps this could be done in the field. Could you explain some of those techniques?
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah, sure. There are some pieces of equipment which are mobile, or you might call them portable. Think about all the other people who are vets, you know, the vets go out to the farms to do x-rays of whatever animal that needs to be done. So these portable equipments do exist. And other people have used either equipment used by the army. So it's rugged, was able to travel in the past and the distant past, you'd have chemical film. So you need to worry about
00:19:17
Speaker
you know, the supplies of either the film itself, the liquids that go with it, and then having a dark room, always a bit of a challenge. Nowadays, we have digital radiography. And digital radiography, you can use the same like a, it's a film, but it's not a film, it's a digital film, which could be used over and over and over, you don't need to worry about.
00:19:36
Speaker
resources, the logistics of having films sent out to you. And you can take the fight to them, you know, you can take your machine, you can go off there, you can do stuff. But these pieces of equipment are fairly expensive. And most archaeological, well, these commercial units won't be interested in that. And it falls down to maybe research, you know, universities who have it and even then,
00:20:00
Speaker
There's only certain circumstances you can use them, but some people do have them. There's a few places, people in the UK, you have this portable machine, which is standard practice in hospitals, because we've got to go to the wards. We've got to go out to ITU and take x-rays of very poorly people. We come down to the radiology department. So they exist. So that is a very useful piece of equipment.
00:20:25
Speaker
The other thing is that we have dental x-ray machines. And those you see in the dentist, you know, the ones that look like a gun, perhaps it looks like they hold it to your face and take an x-ray of your back teeth, perhaps. And there's ones that are wall mounted. So I'm talking about the ones that are handheld. There's machines called Nomads.
00:20:44
Speaker
as it implies, you can go wherever you want with them. And they've got a fairly sizable battery power. And there have been archaeological studies where they've used them in a novel way to look at bony anatomy, to identify pathologies in a very small scale and very accessible for researchers and other people.
00:21:02
Speaker
I guess that just reminds me dental technology, man, that is, it seems to be growing in leaps and bounds. I was at my dentist just last December getting a crown and they used a device that they put into my mouth and I could hear it going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and clicking off these video, these, these images really fast. And they were in real time taking images and processing on a screen that I could see
00:21:27
Speaker
3D color photogrammetric images of my teeth. It was highly disturbing how accurate was. It was crazy. Yeah, technology moves on quickly.
00:21:36
Speaker
Oh man, so crazy. Paul, I think you may have had a question. No, I was just thinking that it's fascinating that I hadn't even thought of portable X-ray machines as a potential tool in the field archaeologist toolkit. Obviously expensive, specialized, but I was kind of curious about the specialized because again, back to your role as an educator,
00:22:00
Speaker
What kind of training would be involved in teaching somebody how to use this kind of equipment archaeologically? I'd say there's two types of training that you have to consider. You have to consider the training of being safe with radiation because the danger radiation, all radiation could cause cancer and that sort of concern. So in the field, when you have an X-ray source which can, in theory, shoot anywhere,
00:22:27
Speaker
You could expose onto radiation that they don't need, and that's obviously dangerous. It could be a cumulative radiation, which is bad, or there's a risk called stochastic risk, which means any radiation could cause cancer. That's one aspect. There's radiation protection to be considered. The second thing is about the knowledge of how to take good x-rays, a bit like a photographer.
00:22:50
Speaker
There are variables involved and there are views, you know, ready graphic projections of views that are optimal for certain types of anatomy. Or if you're not talking about anatomy, you're talking about an object, you've got to know how to manipulate the exposure factors evolved to gain the best possible image for that item. And with digital radiography, you have that blessed opportunity to take as many x-rays as you like because it's digital, when you're not going to waste any film.
00:23:19
Speaker
But if you don't, then it's a bit of a risk, isn't it? I'm assuming that it's not just raw trial and error when you're working with the different variables to get a good image. I'm assuming that there's a fair amount of expertise that goes into you in particular, having done this in the past. What are some of the variables that we've run into that somebody would have to learn in the same way you use the analogy to photography?
00:23:43
Speaker
One needs to know about ISO and aperture and shutter speed. What would be the kinds of variables that go into a good radiograph? I think you could use photography quite well as an analogy. X-rays, they have a strength
00:23:59
Speaker
So you will be shooting those x-rays, and some of them will be, let's say, weak, and some of them will be strong. If you want to get through a very dense object, you need to have strong x-rays, and you need to control the quantity of x-rays. So if you want to have lots and lots and lots of x-rays to get through, you need to expose for longer. So the strength will be the voltage of the tube.
00:24:22
Speaker
And the quantity will be the tube current. And those two variables, some of them you'll be pretty much standard for you can use clinical numbers, you know, clinical settings. And you can think, yeah, this is about a knee x-ray in the clinical environment for this piece of whatever I'm using. I'll probably use that.
00:24:41
Speaker
But there are other variables as well, like the distance, the distance between the object and the detector or the film, the distance between the object and then the tube, the x-ray tube, and then the angle. It is all sorts of things. It is a, it is a specialism. And I think the more you get into a specialism, the more geeky you get and any photographer probably be the same.
00:25:04
Speaker
You've talked about objects and x-raying certain things, and we're talking in radiography in general. To be honest, when most people probably think of x-rays, they think of bones, right? I want to see bones. I want to see inside.
Fascinating X-Ray Discoveries
00:25:16
Speaker
What are some of the things that radiography, and I think more specifically x-rays, because it's very interesting to me, what are some of the things you can, I don't know, look at or look into using x-rays that we may not be thinking of?
00:25:27
Speaker
I can draw upon my experience with working with a lady called Dana Goodburn Brown. She's a conservator in the Southeast, and she's been very good to me. She's brought me lots of nice things to X-Ray. I know, it's great, isn't it? Once you say you've got an X-Ray machine and you're willing to do that for them, they just flock around you. They really want to have stuff X-Ray'd.
00:25:48
Speaker
We've done Bronze Age axes. The Bronze Age axes come from a hoard. For the life of me, I can't remember the name of the hoard. That's really, really useful because we can look at the internal structure of that Bronze Age axe. There's a whole bunch of them. Bronze Age axes, we can see the size of the
00:26:09
Speaker
cavity in the inside, the way that it's been set, whether there's different ways that the bronze has set, and whether we can mimic it with some experimental archaeology in the future. We've also done Anglo-Saxon swords, whether they're sort of fragments or whether they're complete. That'd be really good to see either the state of preservation or the state of decay. I've done Tudor corsets. So Tudor England
00:26:36
Speaker
courses to see how they're constructed from the inside. And then a plethora of other weird and random items from a museum, everyday items, just to see how they're made. This is made in the Victorian age. What's inside them? How do they work? So that's the kind of stuff I've been doing. I've done a lot of pots.
00:26:57
Speaker
A lot of pots from the portable antiquity scheme in the UK, where they want to find out is there any treasure inside, so I can claim it as treasure. This is the metal detectorists. I haven't found any gold yet.
00:27:13
Speaker
But they're all very willing to come to me. They'll bring like a bronze urn or a ceramic urn or a Lexray inside and hopefully see a nice round coin, but most of the time it's just little jumbled up pieces of bone.
00:27:28
Speaker
You're saying people bring you stuff to x-ray, which is fantastic. It makes me think of a YouTube channel. There's a number of them, right? There's one called, I think it's called Will It Blend? They'll put an iPad in an industrial blender or something like that.
00:27:44
Speaker
There's one where I know there's a guy that's using like an industrial, like a press, and he'll just crush stuff to what it's like completely flat. And that's just like, you just watch it because it's fascinating. I'm telling you, you got to have on part of your YouTube channel, I see it linked on your website here, but you need to have a whole series called what's inside of it. You don't need to explain anything.
00:28:05
Speaker
Will it x-ray? We've done shields and all sorts. You know, there's random little pieces of metal in Britain. When you dig down a couple of inches, you'll find loads of stuff and some of it's metal. And then in the end of the day, the archill just sort of scratches his head and goes, I've got like,
00:28:28
Speaker
30 kilograms of metal. Do we need to keep any of it? And the museum goes, I'm not sure. You said shields. What would you see in like inside of like a shield? Like, what can you even see like a wooden shield? I guess you could see nails or something, right? The wooden part would be gone, but there might be rivets on the back of the box. And to show the construction of that, you know, just wonderful.
00:28:53
Speaker
That's a very much industrial radiography kind of mindset, away from the clinical mindset. But the opportunity to see that, and you don't often get that opportunity in my line of work, although it's becoming more frequent now. As I say, people know about me and they come to meet me.
00:29:11
Speaker
we x-ray stuff together and I just really enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. As my colleague Adelina Tiaraka from Canterbury Archaeological Trust, she brings with loads of stuff and I said to her, have you got any more interesting stuff to x-ray?
00:29:26
Speaker
And we x-rayed together and she says, that is the point, the magical point where you're the first person ever to see the inside of that item, right there and then standing in that room. And she said, that's for me, that's the point of magic. That's the little bit. That's great.
00:29:43
Speaker
nice. I want to get probably in segment three, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the projects you've worked on and some of the more interesting things that you think you've, some of the stuff you've worked with. But I'm curious, you know, as archeologists, we always get the question, what's the coolest thing you've ever found? Or, you know, if they don't know what they're talking about, have you ever found any dinosaur bones? But in the vein of what's the coolest thing you've ever found, have you ever
00:30:06
Speaker
image something or analyzed a series of images and as the picture resolves, you're just like, what the heck is that? Or something that was just completely unexpected or just, I don't know. I'm trying to think of stuff that would just be like a doctor imaging somebody and saying, why is there a telephone inside of your abdomen? That kind of thing.
00:30:26
Speaker
But you know, it's called not clinical. Yes. All sorts of things. Oh, no, no, this is a family channel. Okay, so the most exciting thing that I've seen of late is taking initially just the x-rays of the ancient Egyptian mummified head from Canterbury museums and galleries.
00:30:51
Speaker
So they have this head which is unwrapped, because you know about the Victorians, they love to have their unwrapping parties. So it's one of those that's being collected in the Victorian time, given to the museum eventually. We x-rayed it and inside, and this is also shown in the CT scans, which again, some videos I'll put on eventually, there's some very odd tubes being shoved up the spinal canal.
00:31:19
Speaker
Uh, also down something in the left nostril and they kind of almost meet in the middle sort of shove right up. And I mean, they, they pushed out away some anatomy out of the way. And, and we think that I think maybe they used it as some sort of stand, but it looks old. It looks Brown. It looks dated. It looks, I think maybe Victorian. I think that's why. And it looks so odd and so Brown and old. We didn't see it initially until we did the imaging. Wow. That's crazy. I just, I'm blown away by it. I'm blown away by that.
00:31:49
Speaker
imaging. I don't know, because there's not any other way that you would even know something like that, right? Because people aren't just cutting some of this stuff open as a matter of course. And in fact, in a lot of cases, I would think back to say Native American remains that have been analyzed and in disputed fashion here in this country where
00:32:09
Speaker
I'm not sure some sort of radiography would satisfy some Native American tribal concerns about invasive procedures and things like that. I'm not really sure how they would feel about that. It'd be interesting to have that discussion with some tribal groups.
Ethical Considerations in Radiography
00:32:24
Speaker
I feel like those sorts of techniques should be in more wider usage because of their nondestructive nature. We're relatively used to some nondestructive geophysical techniques, but when it comes to examining the human body and some of the ethical concerns around that and ancestral remains and things like that that we have, especially in this country, this seems like it could be a game changer.
00:32:47
Speaker
Well, it is, and it has been, because in the past, we've had, so I've just brought up an article I read, it's about, it's called the standardized protocol for photographic and photographic documentation of human skeletons. And I can't pronounce the surname, Bruelheid and Beck and Pelot. Probably a French way of saying that. Let's say an article has written American,
00:33:12
Speaker
where they did systematic imaging, photographic, radiographic of remains, just as you say, native remains, for reburial. So they captured it. They didn't think to themselves there is something on these bones. They're doing systematic imaging so that later on down the line, they had the opportunity to examine this. And for these authors, that's what they proposed and what they've used and what I've used to base some of my research upon.
00:33:41
Speaker
Okay. Nice. All right. Well, so much more we need to talk about and we only have one more segment to do it in. So let's take our last break and come back and do that. We'll be back in a minute.
00:33:54
Speaker
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00:34:14
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to The Architect Podcast, episode 171. Today, we're talking with James Elliott about the work he's doing with x-ray radiography of archaeological remains of various kinds. Now, you've mentioned a couple of times, more than alluded to, you discussed a little bit about this mummified head that you were x-raying, and I could see from your website and publications that you've worked with other
00:34:39
Speaker
mummified remains and other human skeletal remains. That's something that I find very interesting. I think a lot of people that have just passed the inacquaintances with archaeology
00:34:53
Speaker
kind of understand. We may have seen it in a National Geographic or on BBC or something where x-rays are being used on archaeological remains to learn a
X-Rays in Understanding Ancient Health
00:35:05
Speaker
little about the people themselves, not just about the construction of an axe, for me to use your example before, but also about the lives of the individuals that we're looking at. I'm especially interested in what can be learned about pathologies. I was wondering if you could discuss that a little bit for us.
00:35:23
Speaker
Yeah, sure. With the mummies, and there's been a lot of people doing mummy scans, you can find out a lot about pathologies with an individual. The whole body scans have been done with CT scans. You can see things like sclerosis, arthroscrosis, so calcification of the arteries. You can see osteoarthritis. You can see pathologies like cancer. And you can do all that by doing this 3D scan. It's not technically 3D, but we're going to call it 3D for simplicity.
00:35:53
Speaker
CD scans are great for when you can't unwrap that mummy because otherwise it's a destructive process. But what about x-rays? And x-rays produce a 2D picture and they won't be able to get rid of that and set that problem of overlapping structures.
00:36:09
Speaker
But I believe x-rays still have a place in the world. It's more accessible. People are generally going to get hold of x-ray machine more than a CT scanner. And you can see lots of different pathologies. You can assess for lesions, which, you know, cancer lesions. You can assess for metabolic diseases. You can assess for congenital deformations. And you can see something like Harris lines, which I believe Paul, you know about.
00:36:33
Speaker
I wouldn't go so far to say I know about them, but I think that that's a very interesting application because, again, trying to understand how people live, that Harris Lines for our listeners, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, but they're
00:36:49
Speaker
lines visible on long bones when somebody's growth is interrupted, typically by malnutrition. We could look a little bit about a person's life history directly by examining their bones. Is that more or less accurate?
00:37:05
Speaker
Yes, that's right. And so Harris lines are interesting, because it's not only sort of bad nutrition, but it could also be a point in time where they've had, you know, being really, really very unwell. So where the bodies got to the stage where they can't continue growing as normal, and then they do grow normal. Then you have that line that deposition. And depending on how old you are depends on where that line is. So some people even go as far as being able to create a formula, where you can work out what point in their life did they get this
00:37:34
Speaker
this biological stress, and this is through x-rays. A colleague of mine did a study where she compared CT scans with x-rays for accuracy to see, well, if we had the opportunity, should we use CT scans or x-rays to identify Harris lines? And CT had greater visualization of the bones, but
00:37:56
Speaker
And in the end, they said, well, really, you can use x-rays, but obviously you do two views. Like I said earlier on, you need to do two x-rays from 90 degree angles. And so based upon that, I've done some research with, as I said, Adelina Tioaka from Canterbury Archaeological Trust, where we x-rayed the remains of 92 remains to look at Harris lines. But I wanted to find out about what's the best way to do x-rays for bones. And she wanted to find out about the Harris line.
00:38:25
Speaker
That's right. What other kinds of things can you learn about about people's lives and deaths presumably by looking at their bones? Can we tell things like age or sex or well, I don't even know.
00:38:41
Speaker
Well, yeah, there are many things you can find out for a lot of people that aging someone can be down to sort of visual inspection. But when you get down to children, sometimes get a bit tricky. So if you did x-rays of teeth or the mandible, you can see uninterrupted teeth and then use aging methods of predictable eruption methods or
00:39:02
Speaker
dating of the teeth, let's say, getting my words mixed up, to see how old they could be. And we did that for the remains of Saint Ainsworth. One of the Anglo-Saxon saints in Kent, they had her remains, but we're not sure how old she was. So we did x-rays, and sure enough, her wisdom tooth, her mola, was not quite erupted. That helped to age her. You can also learn about the bone status from a perspective of density.
00:39:30
Speaker
There's something called photodense strong tree, where you can compare how dense the bone is in comparison to an item of known density to work out their bone mineral density. And this is a very old technique harking back before we had DEXA scans, which is the current gold standard.
00:39:50
Speaker
And then even beyond that, there's something called radiogrammetry, where we can look at the thickness, the cortical thickness of bone to assess for bone loss. So do two different things, photodense, stromgy for the density of the bone, so osteoporosis, osteopenia. And then we have radiogrammetry for the loss of bone, determined by the thickness of the cortices.
00:40:19
Speaker
And that's done with mostly in modern practice, the carpal bones, the hand bones. But anyway, I digress. No, that's great. And presumably you could do this across a number of individuals to get a look at a population in a certain time or certain place to see if they're common pathologies or patterns to their ages or injuries and so on, I guess.
00:40:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's a guy called Simon Mays, who's an archaeologist in the UK. He's done a lot of studies about cortical thickness, and he's done it across several populations, so that the data was there to look at it. And then there's another one called a lady called Bernadette Manifold, and she did a study about photodense trometry for the skeletal remains of children. And there is a data set there to compare against, but there's so many different variables involved that you have to be careful about comparing life alike.
00:41:14
Speaker
bones that are in the ground, they can undergo leaching, you know, chemical leaching, where they lose bone density. And of course, you've got the whole variety of sort of taphonomic change, where bones can be damaged. And if there's any bones with cancers where you increase density, or, or let's say, Paget's disease, uncontrolled, disorganised bone growth, you're going to get really dense bones, and you'll just throw your, your whole hypothesis out the window.
00:41:41
Speaker
So there's lots of things out there that can be identified or diagnosed or confirmed with diagnosis with x-rays.
00:41:48
Speaker
Just on that note real quick, I was wondering, when we think of clinical x-rays and bones that are inside a living human's body, those are, I guess what I would refer to as wet bones, as compared to bones you would find in the archaeological record, which would be probably for the most part dry bones, unless they're not deceased all that long ago. And they've still got some wetness to them, for lack of a better way to say that. I don't know what the clinical way to say that is.
00:42:16
Speaker
Is there something that you either lose or gain with archaeological remains that are say dry versus your standard imaging?
James Elliott's Online Course
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah, they are different density because they've lost their water content. So your imaging approach is different. So in that study I did with medieval and some post-medieval bones from St. Albans, we did that survey of nine to two different skeletons and we had to discover what was the best exposure values that
00:42:46
Speaker
tube voltage, tube currents, to be able to image them successfully. We found that it doesn't matter what size the bone was, that actually a 55 and 5, so a 55KV in Firebase MES, produced the best kind of images for what we wanted. But there are discrepancies there between imaging systems. So yeah, there are differences.
00:43:06
Speaker
All right, well, we are coming to the end of this podcast, but I would be remiss if we didn't mention, especially since we're going to be helping you promote this course here over the Archaeology Podcast Network. But you are a lecturer in diagnostic radiography at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, and that's not enough teaching for you. So instead, you decided to, or in addition to, you decided to put together a course, an online course. Tell us about that online course and what somebody can learn from taking that course.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So the title of the course is an introduction to paleo-radiography. And paleo-radiography is a term that is used in academia, but not greatly so. And it just sort of intertwines those two concepts, paleo meaning ancient, and then radiography meaning the use of x-rays to produce an image.
00:43:53
Speaker
And within the course, you'll be able to learn about the application of x-rays from a professional point of view with mental work with bones and ceramics to a lesser extent. And I've produced a rich and
00:44:08
Speaker
and varied training websites do this and it's been endorsed by the Chartist Institute for archaeologists in the UK. So it is professional training with something to boost your CV. It doesn't cost you much, it's £50 and I don't know what that equates to, dollars or whatever you're listing in the world. But that gains you six months access and as well as a certificate sent out by email.
00:44:34
Speaker
But the interesting thing is that I have actually developed this course alongside undergraduate archaeology students. I invited 100 students from across the world to participate on this online course on my website, paleoimaging.com. And they told me the best way to present this information and to teach them. And the first thing they said was, you've included too much about radiography, which is unusual for a course called an introduction to paleo radiography.
00:45:04
Speaker
Honestly, yeah, they all moan. They said you've got too much science in this. You need more examples. So yeah, I do. I heavily rely upon open access literature, which demonstrates from the academic community, the application of x-rays in there.
00:45:21
Speaker
It's divided into four sections and you can study wherever and whenever you want on your phones, on your tablet, but ideally on a PC with a good screen and a pair of headsets to listen to me in the videos. You can see the x-rays I take at Canterbury as well. Nice. Wonderful. Quick question about that. Does the student in your class, do they have to have access to an x-ray machine to be able to follow along?
00:45:45
Speaker
No, but it would be wonderful if they could post their pictures and say, look James, look what I've done today. I'm like, wow, that'd be amazing. No, they don't need to have an X-ray machine. They simply just need to have a PC with the internet and the ability to study for four hours, but over a six month period. And that's what they need. And it's based upon
00:46:06
Speaker
my research, and it's published research, you can have a look at it, try before you buy, let's say, and then there's a little promo video that's available on the website as well.
00:46:18
Speaker
Well, since you mentioned your research in the last few minutes of this episode, is there some research you've been working on lately that you're particularly proud of or is particularly interesting to you that you'd like to talk about? Yeah, I kind of mentioned it in passing already, but yeah, I did a study with Adelina. We looked at the potential for identifying Harris lines. She really wanted to sort of x-ray to a skeletal survey for these nine to two medieval post-medieval remains.
00:46:46
Speaker
from St. Albans in the UK. So she could find out, A, which bones should we use to identify Harris lines? Because everyone says, let's all use tibia. And I suppose there's a reason for that because when we looked at all the bones, we did what, 426 bones and all, all from, from two views of the front and the side and gosh, did they take a while. It took five days even with our digital x-ray equipment. We found out that actually, you know what, the tibia are the best.
00:47:13
Speaker
the tibia, if you're going to do a study to look at Harris lines, and you had limited number of resources or time, go for the tibia. The other bones, humerae, radii, and the femur, you're not going to see it as much. And I only use that experience, it was a reflective experience to find out what is the best way to x-ray bones if I needed to, and if I need to apply that to not only archaeology, but forensics.
00:47:37
Speaker
We decided that it was best to have a multidisciplinary team, to have really diligent record-taking, and to work methodically, to really work methodically. And there's an open access piece of work which I've done, which is called Radiocu of human bones are effective accounts with recommendations for practice. It's open access. You can find it on my website, or I'm sure there'll be a link as well.
00:48:03
Speaker
and to look at so they did a like a flow diagram to show how it worked and there's a list of a bullet point of recommendations at the end if you wanted to go out and and do x-rays of bones for archaeological research for paleo radiography.
00:48:18
Speaker
Nice. One last question then about the need or lack of a need for the researcher to have an x-ray machine themselves. Clearly, you have a pipeline of people bringing you interesting materials to x-ray. Do you have recommendations for people who aren't located in Kent? How they find somebody that can x-ray archaeological materials for them?
00:48:40
Speaker
I'd say before the COVID environment, I'd say go to the hospital and make friends with the radiographer or however you turn in your country, because they have different titles. But with the COVID environment, it's been very, very difficult. Even organizing to have that CT scan of the head at Maystone Hospital in Kent, we had to wait until COVID has more or less died down. God, I wish.
00:49:03
Speaker
And we had to do out of hours, make sure there's no compromise to patient services, just that we remember they don't cause a political storm. But for guys out there, I'd say, really, you want to either approach a university who has equipment and suggested a project or approach a friendly radiographer or member of staff at a hospital to say, I'd like to do this. And nine times out of 10,
00:49:29
Speaker
they want to have a bit of enrichment in their life. They want a bit of variety and they'll probably be very interested and want to do it. Awesome. Nice. Yeah. I was wondering about that too. Like anybody hears this over in the UK, it just starts sending you things. Like you need to set up a consultancy business, start charging for it. And I don't know what the cost is of doing that kind of thing. But my love of it is too strong for that at the moment. I just, I just enjoy discovering, researching and sharing with the world.
00:49:56
Speaker
Nice. Well, I did look up the cost of your course in US dollars for a US audience. It's about $69.70, so that's still not very bad at all. A lot of courses are two, three, four times that for the value that you get.
00:50:12
Speaker
This is really good and would be super fun to just learn something that you may not, to be honest, use very much. Or in CRM archaeology, if you're a CRM archaeologist in the United States, you may not even have the ability to do that. But having that as one more thing in your tool bag, your mental tool bag is, hey, we found this. I heard about this kind of thing. It might be good. Let's try to find somebody to take a look at this. And it might come in handy, which is why we do this podcast. So
00:50:40
Speaker
All right. Well, everybody go check out the links in the show notes. Paul, do you have anything else to wrap this up? Not to wrap it up, just to complicate things. It would be interesting if that course was available for RPA credit in the US, same way that it's eligible for charter credit in the UK.
00:50:59
Speaker
It's not currently, but it might not be a heavy lift. It's been approved in the UK in order to get something comparable in the US. Then it becomes extra added value that makes that $70 US. That stretches it pretty far. It makes it a very good deal.
00:51:15
Speaker
That's something I definitely will look into. Yeah. And policies may have changed on this. I've looked into that in the past and they typically require somebody involved with the educational resource to be an RPA, but I don't know if that extends to international courses or something like that, where maybe it wouldn't make sense for them to be part of a US-based register like this. So who knows? Definitely look into it because that would be, Paul's totally right. There's nothing like that over here that I'm aware of, and that would be a great addition to some of the resources they have on offer.
00:51:44
Speaker
Okay. Well, again, thanks a lot, James. We look forward to having you on again sometime in the future. I hope everybody goes and signs up for your course right now. If not, you're going to hear about it probably a few more times over the next six months as we help him advertise and get the word out for that. If you happen to be with the RPA, get in touch with James and let's see about getting some RPA credit for that because the more the merrier on that stuff.
00:52:11
Speaker
Again, thanks a lot Paul and thanks a lot James and thanks everybody and we'll see you next time. Bye bye, take care. Thank you very much.
00:52:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:52:49
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by 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.
00:53:16
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.