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Droning on with Paul in Iraq - Ep 168
257 Plays4 years ago
Paul was invited on a project in Iraq and has returned to tell us all about it. What was getting to Iraq like? How'd the preparation for photogrammetry go? We find out about the Lagash Archaeological Project and how the project went.
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- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
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.
Episode Overview: Archaeotech Podcast 168
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the archaeotech podcast episode 168. I'm your host Chris Webster with my co-host Paul Zimmerman.
Paul's Drone Photogrammetry Trip to Iraq
00:00:25
Speaker
Today we discuss Paul's recent trip to Iraq and his experiences doing drone photogrammetry while he was there. Let's get to it.
00:00:34
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, welcome to this hemisphere. Hey, thank you. How are you doing? Good, good. Yeah, I'll start. I'll start with where I'm at because we always we always say that. But that's a really quick one. Then we're going to talk about where you've been because we've been leading up to it for the last month or so. But we're back in North Carolina like we were the same time last year. And we're here until beginning of January where we spent because of
00:00:59
Speaker
I don't know. I wouldn't call it poor planning. It's kind of fun, but we have basically five days from the time we're done here to get to basically California again, Lake Havasu City, Arizona, which is on the border of California, Arizona for an event we're going to. So that should be fun. One direction across the country and right back across the other as fast as we can go.
00:01:16
Speaker
Oh boy. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Coffee fueled, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely. But you just got back this week from Iraq. We've been talking about that last few episodes that we had you on and we want to hear all about it. So let's just maybe set it up with the project that you were on and then talk about what you did there.
Lagash Archaeological Project with Dr. Holly Pittman
00:01:39
Speaker
Right. So the project I was on was it's part of the Lagash Archaeological Project, which is out of the University of Pennsylvania. The head of the project is Dr. Holly Pittman. She was one of my professors when I was there. She was also my wife's dissertation advisor, art historian, worked all over Mesopotamia, Turkey and Iran and Iraq.
00:02:04
Speaker
Syria too, most likely. I can't remember what project she may have worked on there. Anyhow, so art historian, but with a lot of fieldwork experience under her belt. And a month and a half or so ago, two months maybe, she was visiting a professor, Edward Oxenschlager, who was one of the principals on the project at the site called Lagash, which is in the south of Iraq in Degar Governorate.
00:02:29
Speaker
That project ran from 1968 to 1990. I know Professor Ochsen's logger from my time in Yemen, because he was one of the principals on the project that I worked on there as a young grad student in 1994 and 1995.
00:02:46
Speaker
He lives half an hour from me up here in the country, so I visit him every now and then. Anyhow, so Dr. Pitman was visiting Dr. Oxenschlager, and talking about this upcoming project, they wanted to do a very short season, just a couple weeks, and one of the parts of it was going to be doing some drone mapping. They wanted to get a new contour plan of the major site of Lagash, as well as some other drone mapping on various other sites in the area.
00:03:12
Speaker
And so she was talking to him, who could we get to do this? And he said, well, you know, Paul recently quit his job at Dalton and he's pretty good with tech, we know. So why don't you call him? And she called me and
00:03:27
Speaker
Wow, I've been waiting 30 years to get to Iraq and I finally got the chance and it did not disappoint. It was so much fun. Nice, nice. Well, let's, for those that, you know, are in the United States anyway and hear Iraq, they might think, conflict, CNN, all that kinds of stuff. What was your experiences just getting to Iraq and then getting around in Iraq when
Experiences in Iraq vs. Media Portrayal
00:03:55
Speaker
you were there?
00:03:55
Speaker
Right. So Iraq has been more or less open to Americans for a few years now. I know a number of archaeologists have been working in the north in what's Iraqi Kurdistan, but in the south where the major Mesopotamian sites that you've heard of are all located, it's been Italian, British, French projects primarily, but not so many US-based projects. So this project, the Lagash Archaeological Project,
00:04:23
Speaker
had a season in 2019. But what's happened is that Dr. Pittman now has the permit for Lagash, which is a major site in 3rd millennium BC, Mesopotamia, Sumerian site with
00:04:41
Speaker
a major city state in the early dynastic period of the middle third millennium BCE, and also major presence in the late third millennium BCE in what's called the Neo Sumerian period. So anyhow, that just background here, Americans have been working, including some that are on this project in various sites in the South, but not to the level that other people from other parts of the world have.
00:05:09
Speaker
But fortunately, we've got this permit. So I flew from New York to Istanbul with a connecting flight to Basra, and then we got a ride from Basra up to Shatra and to Lagash, so a couple hours away.
00:05:29
Speaker
It's been interesting. Let me put it this way. I have no sense of any kind of personal danger. I did not feel threatened in any way whatsoever.
00:05:45
Speaker
However, the authorities were extremely concerned about having Americans there, not in a bad way, in a good way, in that they wanted to make sure that we'd be safe. And so what that meant practically, now this project this season is just a tiny little skeleton crew. There were four of us on the project.
00:06:05
Speaker
Okay. The main part of the project was a grad student, one of Dr. Pippman's, uh, I advisees, Reed Goodman. He was doing soil course for his dissertation. There was my side project of doing these maps and there were two other people. One is, uh, Philip Florin, who was a, uh, he's a Romanian, not an archeologist, but a geographer, soil scientist. And he was brought along to help Reed doing the drilling.
00:06:33
Speaker
and Zeta Rowey, who's in an Iraqi living in America and is the project's… He's also a PhD archaeologist himself, but he's the project's facilitator, go-to guy, handles the paperwork, handles the rentals and that sort of stuff. So it was just the four of us. But despite being the four of us living in a farmhouse right next to the site,
00:07:01
Speaker
little village, totally safe, no problem. Everybody knows us. We had two different dispatches of police keeping us safe. So we had two big tents outside the dig house, one full of antiquities police and one full of police from the GAR government.
00:07:17
Speaker
on our drive up from Basra. The word came out that we were coming through, so we ended up being guests of the police at Naciria, so we're in the police station there, being interviewed, talking to them, interviewing the local paper. There was a lot of hubbub about a very small project. And then the whole time that we were there, we had police with us all the time.
00:07:44
Speaker
I actually found it a little problematic, not because of anything that they were doing particularly, but because they were so afraid for our safety that even though the site itself was 15, 20 second walk from the house, literally it's one house between ours and the site.
00:08:03
Speaker
I couldn't go up onto the tell without a police escort. I felt no kind of unsafeness about it, though we were watching the news happening in Baghdad with an eye toward our own safety because there was that drone attack against the prime minister and there were protests. Apparently, there were some protests also in the south where we were, though I didn't see any of it firsthand, but I'd heard about it.
00:08:35
Speaker
What can I say? I felt no personal threat, but it was underlying the whole time that we were there.
00:08:43
Speaker
That's good. I just wanted to get that out of the way because you hear about some of these places and people just get afraid of doing anything there because of a lot of media hype. I mean, there's still some dangerous areas and things going on, I'm sure, but there is a lot of lumping the entire country into one state of being when it's just not that case.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah. And what I've always found, I found this in Yemen as well, when I was doing my dissertation research, is that there's a real market difference in the way that people treat you if you are a faceless representative of some foreign government, right?
00:09:21
Speaker
versus if you're a scientist working there, living with the people that you're working with, with the locals, trying your best to speak their language, hanging out with them, joking with them, whatever. The personalization of that kind of interaction defrays so much of the threat, or at least my perception of the threat is defrayed so much by it.
00:09:46
Speaker
You know, that's not to say that there might not be somebody that has a real grudge against an American hearing that we're there and coming through and causing trouble. But in all my years of field work, I've never experienced anything like that. Okay. Well, good to know. So in the last part of this segment, let's talk about why you guys were there. What was the reason behind the project? We'll get to what you did and some of the actual activities you guys did and maybe some of your findings later on in the show. But
00:10:13
Speaker
What was the reason you guys were there? What was the question you're trying to answer or the data you were trying to collect?
Studying Persian Gulf's Coastline Changes
00:10:19
Speaker
Right. The main part of the project was Reed's core samples. He was trying to get down through a few thousand years of sediments accumulated in Southern Iraq to try to find out what was happening to the coastline there. There is a theory that was not widely supported when I was a grad student, but seems to have certainly gained traction that the coastline
00:10:44
Speaker
of the Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf, depending who's doing the map. The coastline of the Gulf has moved southward over time. If you think of the way that the Mississippi Delta has been pushing out into the Gulf of Mexico,
00:11:03
Speaker
Same sort of thing. The Tigris and Euphrates have over the millennia pushed the coastline farther and farther out. So these very old cities, Mesopotamian cities like Ur and like Uruk, and even Lagash, which is farther north than those two, which is one that we're at, didn't used to be
00:11:23
Speaker
miles and miles and miles inland, but used to be in a semi-coastal environment at the time of their heights. Ur has probably two harbors on it, so it's likely that they were in a marshy environment. Right now, you go to Ur and it's just flat and very desolate around there and dry.
00:11:48
Speaker
dead land. But at the time that people were living there, it probably was not like that. So anyhow, Reed's project, which was the crux of what we're doing, is trying to get a number of soil cores to find out about what the changes were and when especially the changes were
00:12:06
Speaker
on the coastline in that area. Was it a marine environment? Was it marsh? Was it tidal coming and going? Was this a trend that was unitary in one direction through time? Or were there times that it ebbed and flowed? So that's what he was trying to get at. And I was just brought along for the ride because they need maps, because they want to start doing some serious excavation next year. So I might be going back in the spring, fingers crossed,
00:12:35
Speaker
at Lagash and they wanted to get a new map and they wanted to test out the drone mapping and they wanted to do all of the above. So yeah, I was there in a supporting role. Okay. Well, I think before we really get into it and have to get cut off here, let's just take a break right now and come back on the other side and talk about exactly what you guys did and how that all went back in a minute.
00:13:00
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:14:23
Speaker
Welcome back to the architect podcast episode 168, droning on with Paul. That's what, uh, calling this on and on and on. I'm good at that. That's right. That's right. Me too. Hey, that's what, you know, podcasters are inherently good at that, I think. So, all right. So
00:14:43
Speaker
I love how all this came together for you, actually, because you started getting into drone flying not that long ago, really, and upgrading your equipment, getting some real stuff. And then you recently went and got your drone license. I think that what you were planning on doing that, but you were probably pushed a little quicker than usual maybe because of this project. So you wanted to
00:15:05
Speaker
Maybe get some credentials, I would assume. But given all that, it's really awesome that you got to use those skills out in this environment. So let's talk about, since this is the Archiotech podcast, how did you prepare to go out there?
Drone Technology and Preparations
00:15:20
Speaker
We talked about
00:15:21
Speaker
you getting ready to prepare to think about all this stuff a few episodes back when we first announced this. But for how did it go, getting your drone over there and the supplies that you brought and did all your planning end up being... We're going to talk about this throughout the whole segment, but basically, did all your planning end up being too much or not enough? I want to know from a supply standpoint. So let's start at the beginning.
00:15:47
Speaker
When I was first brought on the project, I understood I'd be using a DJI Phantom 4 Pro. Very similar to the three standard that I have, but with improved everything. So I basically knew what to expect in terms of the software and the hardware that I'd be using. So I wasn't worried about that.
00:16:09
Speaker
As it developed, it turned out that we're going to be using for the mapping and the processing of the maps, we're going to be using a product called DroneDeploy. Okay, so I can learn how to use DroneDeploy, no real problem. We had Kyle Olson on a couple of years ago on this podcast talking about an article that he co-wrote.
00:16:31
Speaker
explaining what they were doing with drones, basically experimenting with different elevations, different speeds, and so on. I reread that and discussed the matter with Reed. As we started going forward, we realized that there was a serious problem, which is that the drone that they had was the pro
00:16:53
Speaker
Plus. Now the Pro Plus has a controller that has a built-in display unit, right? So it's basically an Android tablet built into it. We can't run the drone deploy software on that directly.
00:17:09
Speaker
And there were some other problems too. So what they did is they purchased a brand new drone to take out. And this one was the DJI Phantom 4 RTK, which has a fancy GPS while satellite positioning system nubbin on the top of it.
00:17:27
Speaker
They get GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and Beidou. It gets four different satellite systems, so it can be very precise because it measures one against the other.
00:17:40
Speaker
They purchased it actually through Anatom. That was on my recommendation. They wanted to add some questions on GPS and so it ties it back to this podcast. They also got it with the DJI
00:18:00
Speaker
DRTK2 mobile station, which is a base station. So in conjunction, and it also gets those same four bands. So in conjunction of these two, using the DJI software, you can get a positional fix for the drone of, let's see, I was typically getting a centimeter and a quarter in Northern and Easting and about two centimeters in elevation.
00:18:24
Speaker
Without having to sign up for anything else, just go and plop the base station out in the field somewhere and then fly within like a kilometer or half of it so that it could use this correction signal.
00:18:41
Speaker
That's phenomenal. Yeah, it was phenomenal. I had no experience with this system at all, so I could not prepare for it. This particular drone also has a built-in
00:18:56
Speaker
display unit, so you can't run DroneDeploy directly on it. DroneDeploy, fortunately, they do have a white paper. They've got a webpage that explains how you can use the built-in mapping software with DJI's built-in mapping software exported to DroneDeploy for the processing and certain settings so that it keys it into what DroneDeploy is going to expect.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, we'll just just pause there for a second because I'm curious this this pro plus or the or the RTK. It sounds like they're like, you know, a slightly more advanced versions of maybe the lower version that they'd have of the of the Phantom 4. And yet you can't.
00:19:39
Speaker
because of the screen, you can't put your own applications on there. That seems like a serious limitation to me, but it sounds like they also really beefed up their ability to control the drone in a coordinated way like drone to play would do. Is that the case?
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah, that that is exactly the case. Now, probably because these are androids, they're probably the way to sideload the drone software onto it. But I didn't find any good description of how to do that. And I wasn't about to tinker with that because I had another workflow that was supported by drone deploy. But what I ended up doing the drone deploy software, it's all web based and it's very intuitive, very easy to use. So I drew all my my plans, you know, the flight plans in drone deploy on the web.
00:20:27
Speaker
And then I found out how to web scrape. Well, I found out I tinkered with it a little bit. So I'd web scrape the plan that would be displayed on my screen. I wrote a little Python script to process the JSON that had all the coordinates and then turn that into a KML file that I could then upload onto the controller. And then I'd tweak all the other parameters to match what was in drone deploy because drone deploy had their own set of recommendations for like
00:20:58
Speaker
for horizontal and vertical overlap on the images and the elevation that you're flying at and the speed that you're flying at and all that stuff. So basically, you can do all that mapping on the screen, on the controller, but it's not quite responsive. It pissed me off.
00:21:19
Speaker
But doing it in drone deploy was great. And then with the script I wrote, I could then do it there, transfer it onto the controller, and then tweak all the other parameters until I got them the same as what was in drone deploy. And that worked fairly well for me in the end.
00:21:34
Speaker
Okay. But it was a little kluge. And also there was this RTK and the documentation for it from DJI is really not good. It's really awful. Not least of which we didn't know whether or not we needed to have a 4G dongle in it for connecting it to cell signal, right?
00:21:58
Speaker
Okay. And if you flip through the instruction manual, the owner's manual that came with it, there's no mention of the dongle, though there's a slot for the dongle in.
00:22:08
Speaker
in the mobile station. Except for in the Chinese language one, I don't read Chinese. There they had in the parts list, they had an optional 4G dongle, but it wasn't in the English or the French or the Italian or any of the other languages, like 20 other languages there. They didn't have that. They just had it in the Chinese. So I didn't know if this was necessary. There was no mention of it. It turns out it wasn't necessary. It was a little confusing.
00:22:34
Speaker
I had a day of just sitting down trying to figure out how all these parts work together because it was not well documented, but it wasn't hard. And once I figured it out, it worked really well. The biggest problem we had was when we got to Basra Airport, you know, here we had this big fancy drone and this big fancy GPS base station.
Encounter with Basra Airport Authorities
00:22:54
Speaker
And as is want to happen when you're in what used to be a very controlled police state, somebody at the airport said, oh,
00:23:04
Speaker
They didn't want to get in trouble for letting us in and instantly it got confiscated by the Mahabharat, the secret police. We got it back a day and a half later, two days later.
00:23:16
Speaker
because it was an embarrassment on their part because we'd done everything properly. They actually were supposed to have known about it. This is part of the reason why we ended up going to the police station and everything on the way back. Gotcha. Why the police were so interested in protecting us was because there was this initial overstepping of bounds
00:23:37
Speaker
It was CYA on somebody's part, but it was a bit of a political embarrassment because everything was done properly and somebody was afraid that maybe it hadn't been done properly, so the events had to be made. And they were. We got the equipment back in time for me to work with it and in time for me to write a script and figure out how all the pieces worked and then fly everything.
00:24:01
Speaker
Jeez, I used to do total station surveying and the site of Lagash is over 500 hectares in size. It is humongous. To do a site that size with the total station would have taken me over a month to do. It would have taken two people because it's a two-person team, one to run the total station and one to move the prism. Instead,
00:24:27
Speaker
I did it in about four and a half days. We had eight batteries, so I would take out four batteries at a time. One battery in the base station and one battery in the controller. I'd fly for about two hours and then the base station in the controller would be down below half.
00:24:45
Speaker
And I would have used up the four batteries for the drone. I'd come in, we'd have lunch, and I'd go back out and do the other four batteries while I charged the first four batteries up and cycled the other batteries through. So it worked really nicely as a workflow, two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. And then in the meantime, I'd go and lend a hand with the drilling.
00:25:09
Speaker
So it worked okay. The biggest problem that we had was because drone deploy is entirely web-based. I didn't have any trouble generating the maps, but at the end you have to upload all your images and thousands of images that I'd have to upload to the site and it just wouldn't work. So I'm in the process of uploading images right now and I've been extremely pleased with the results I've been getting.
00:25:36
Speaker
Cool. That's awesome. That's, uh, that's really neat. And I'm glad the batteries worked out that way too. The batteries is always kind of the thing you're most concerned about, especially, I mean, you can kind of guess at what the weather's going to be like, uh, by looking at weather forecasting. I don't know how weather forecasting in Iraq is, but, uh, you know, you can kind of get an idea of how windy it's going to be because obviously windier conditions will take your batteries down a lot quicker as the drone tries to stabilize. How was that?
00:26:03
Speaker
the weather. So for the most part, it was hot and fairly still. There were two days that I had wind issues. I could talk about one of them a little later, but for the most part, I was okay with that. The first week was up in the mid-90s to 100, so it was really warm standing out there in the sun.
00:26:24
Speaker
But yeah, weather wasn't really the problem. And the batteries, fortunately, we were able to keep them charged nicely, even though power would go out most days, usually at the most inopportune time. But it was that
00:26:39
Speaker
that internet upload, that's what really bit me because I wasn't able to test as I went. I wasn't able to take the few hundred shots that I took on the last transect and upload them to see if they're any good during that lunch break because there was no way they were going to get uploaded.
00:26:58
Speaker
So I have noticed a few problems caused by the RTK, some elevation problems. So I think I'm going to have to break down rather than have the software, the drone deploy software, map the entirety of the site all at once. I think I'm going to have to break it down session by session, then correct for elevation and stitch them together, which is fine because
00:27:20
Speaker
That's too big of a site to do the contour plans at full resolution anyhow, because then you have lots of squiggly little lines that don't mean anything. We want something smoother, so I'm going to have to down sample it after I switch it together. I'm not bothered by that, but it does mean a little bit of extra work on the back end here. Back to the images real quick. I was thinking about that.
00:27:41
Speaker
I wasn't really putting together what you were saying until you just made the last comment about the images. You had to upload all this to a website to actually see the images. They weren't just being stored on an SD card that you could toss into your computer and take a look at them to get an idea of what they're looking like.
00:27:57
Speaker
Oh, no, no, no, no. They definitely, they're being stored on the SD card on the drone just like anything else. And so then I copy them off to a hard drive. So I had an extra copy. Gotcha. But you have to upload a lot of them up to the drone deploy site in order for their software to be able to put it together to do the photogrammetry.
00:28:16
Speaker
And this is something that actually I was really pleased with. Actually, it's 15 minutes now. Why don't we go to break? And I can talk about some of the mechanics of processing and how pleased I was with it. And I'll tell you a bit of the side projects I did, which are kind of cool. Sounds good. Back in a minute.
00:28:35
Speaker
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00:28:55
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the last segment of the Architect Podcast, Episode 168. Paul, right at the end of the last segment, you were getting ready to tell us about some of the processing and things like that, some of the products we're getting from this. I did want to mention, I didn't get a chance on the last segment, I used drone deploy just to try it out when I had a drone that would do that kind of thing.
00:29:20
Speaker
My God, it was probably like five years ago and I don't remember doing any sort of photogrammetry and maybe I just wasn't using it for that at the time, but that's pretty cool that it actually does the photogrammetry because back when I was using it, its primary function was flight planning and that was pretty much it. So that's really cool that I can do that now.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, so a lot of people are using drones for photogrammetry in archaeology. And I read up on what a bunch of people are doing, and there's so much that's written about the particular workflow. And at the risk of sounding like an ad, maybe we ought to talk to drone deployable.
00:29:54
Speaker
advertising with us. At the risk of sounding like an ad, that's where this really shown for me is that you and I are both Apple guys, right? And so, you know, Apple's always, it just works, right? That's what their catchphrase or one of their catchphrase is up. And I don't really care too much about that for any particular company software. I don't feel any loyalty even to Apple, which I've used their products forever. But
00:30:24
Speaker
having worked in a school, that's something that really matters to me. I want stuff that's simple. Now, simple has, for a lot of tech people, has a really bad connotation and it kind of is synonymous with dumbed down. But in my mind, good simple isn't dumbed down, but is thought out in such a way that 90% of what you're going to do, you can do out of the box with minimal extra effort.
00:30:53
Speaker
If it's extra good, you can override those in certain ways because you have additional knowledge that doesn't apply to the 90% and you have additional skill that you can improve beyond that. But for the most part, for most people, it's going to work right out of the box. That's exactly how drone deploy was for me.
00:31:14
Speaker
I've seen things where people talk about using like Metashape or ODM, and those are very good products, I don't know. But basically, you're tied to having a good computer with a good GPU and then building in a workflow that includes pre-processing your images in order to get good output. All that I had to do was take these images and just upload them.
00:31:38
Speaker
and wait a few hours and end up with a beautiful map at the end of it. I mean, it was really so, so, so simple in a good way. Yeah, I can probably tweak it. I can, you know, I'm definitely going to have to do it for the major Lagash map. Like I said, I'm going to have to post-process that to make the elevations make sense.
00:31:57
Speaker
But it was so, so painless that I highly recommend people looking at it. Now this is, you pay for the software. I mean, it's not, it's not cheap. It's not free. You know, you, you pay for that convenience. But
00:32:16
Speaker
Wow. I'm glad that I'm not paying for it, but somebody else is because then I get to use it and I get to reap the benefits. Yeah. And not only that, but if you're doing this a lot, it would actually, unless you're doing some really detailed stuff where you really need to manipulate every single aspect of the thing, which some people might do that, but most people probably don't have to do that.
00:32:38
Speaker
what drone deploy produces for them, I'm sure is enough. But if you're doing this a lot, I mean, man, you don't have to keep up on the latest software and the latest tech and the latest speeds in your computer. Let them figure that out. All you got to do is upload it and bam, you get maps and they're presumably keeping their equipment to an upgraded standard because they want to be able to do that as much as possible, right? So they're going to crowdsource all that computing power internally and get it done. So that's pretty cool.
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah. I sound like an advertisement for them and I guess maybe I am, but I was so, so thoroughly impressed. That's part of the good thing about it. I could see that in building out the flight plans beforehand, because I built out a few before I went to the field. I could see that it was really well designed, well thought out software. I wasn't really worried that I'd be able to get good products. Now,
00:33:33
Speaker
I just arrived. We're recording on Thursday. I arrived on Tuesday night back in the country. Yesterday, I took care of emails and banking and all the stuff that you have to do when you've been gone for a while.
Modeling the Ziggurat of Ur
00:33:48
Speaker
In the meantime, I also uploaded photos that I took. One of the side projects that we did was we went to the site of Ur. Now, Ur has been on my mind for decades.
00:33:59
Speaker
Nice. It's the major tourist archaeological site alongside Babylon in Iraq. And if you know nothing else, you remember from your fifth grade or sixth grade world history class, you remember something about the ziggurat of war.
00:34:16
Speaker
Well, the Department of Antiquities, ESBA, they wanted a model of one of the buildings right next to the ziggurat, a building called the Et Dubla Ma. They wanted that for conservation purposes. So I quickly planned out the flight path.
00:34:37
Speaker
and however many pictures it took, 100 or 200, and gave a very good measurable 3D model that you can spin around and take measurements on it and zoom in and zoom out and such, really good. But I had to do that for them, for the Department of Antiquities, but because I was on site,
00:35:00
Speaker
I was like, well, what the hell? Let me do a model of the ziggurat. Hey, why not? I woke up this morning and there was an email from Drone2Play saying, hey, we've processed your model of the ziggurat. And I sent Dr. Pittman an email this morning saying, oh my God, this is so sexy. We need to publish this.
00:35:21
Speaker
She hasn't yet responded, so I'm hoping to hear from her very soon. If I hear her from her soon enough, we'll put the link in the show notes. I would like to put this up on Sketchpad, but it's a brilliant freaking model of the Ziggurat of War.
00:35:36
Speaker
That was a lot of fun because I programmed it in. I'm like, how tall is this? I think it's like 50 meters tall. I programmed the drone to fly at 60 meters and then I climbed up on top of the ziggurat and flew it from there. It was a little close for comfort.
00:35:55
Speaker
Yes. But they gave a beautiful, absolutely gorgeous model. And you know what I had to do in terms of my computer hardware and configuration and everything? Nothing. Nothing. I just programmed the flight plan and downloaded the files and upload them on the internet and then woke up the next day with this little treat. Nice.
00:36:20
Speaker
And then there's another one. Because we were there, let's see, we went there twice. So I did half a flight plan. I had some problems. The controller for that DJI drone freaks out every now and then. So twice it wouldn't turn off.
00:36:35
Speaker
got in a kind of a brick state, so I had to open it up and find the internal battery and disconnect that, and then it would start back up again. Let's see. And a couple of times, the return to home function just stopped working on its way back, so I had to put it back into manual flight mode and fly it back home by myself.
00:36:55
Speaker
And once when I was doing, so there's an area there called the Royal Cemetery of Orr. So if you know anything, if you remember anything from your middle school, world history, Mesopotamia, you probably saw things like the Standard of Orr, the Ram and the Thicket. Those all came from tombs that were in that area. I've been thinking about the Royal Cemetery. It was part of what my, not part of, it was my master's thesis was
00:37:25
Speaker
reevaluating the architecture in the royal tombs, of the royal tombs in the royal cemetery. And what I'd realized was that the excavator had mixed contexts. And so that made dating these really problematic because people were going off of, say, ceramics. But they had ceramics from multiple periods because they were mixed contexts. And so I thought, well, ceramics can get mixed contexts, but it's kind of hard to move a building.
00:37:53
Speaker
So I looked at it from the architecture also being kind of an architecture geek that made sense to me. So I've been thinking about the Royal Cemetery in depth for decades and I got to go play around in it. So I started doing a map of it and then the controller freaked out and I had to change batteries after halfway through it and I put in the new battery and instead of starting at the 50% mark, it just went back to the zero.
00:38:20
Speaker
So I wasn't able to finish it until a week later when we went back. And then I did finish it up. Then I got that model and it looks great. Nice. But yeah, so now I've got this model of the Royal Cemetery. I've got a model of the Etubla Ma and I've got a model of the Ziggurat of War.
00:38:37
Speaker
all those three at ore, which were side projects. Only one of them was kind of on scope, but because I was able to work so quickly through the rest of this stuff, because of the tools that I had, it gave me the free time to play with that.
Observations at Lagash Post-Rainfall
00:38:49
Speaker
And then also, you know, I helped read with the drilling just because what else am I going to do? If I'm not flying the drone, I might as well play in the dirt, right? Nice. Nice. Hey, speaking of getting back to Lagash, are there standing structures there? Is it like,
00:39:06
Speaker
Is there anything above ground that's still visible? Right, so there are no ancient standing structures. Yeah. On the entirety of the site, there are, let's see, there's one little guard shack from the old excavations. There's the old dig house from the old excavations and there is a shrine. Okay. A mausoleum basically for some local saint on the site. But ancient stuff does not exist above ground.
00:39:33
Speaker
However, you can see the footprints of buildings
00:39:39
Speaker
if it rains. So there's been some drone work there that you can definitely see parts of buildings and such. And so we were there in the dry season, but if we go back in the spring, it'll probably rain periodically. And then the hope is that I can go and do some drone flights and get some good top-down imagery. And we can do things like look at the placement of the buildings, the streets, how they communicate.
00:40:09
Speaker
A very short occupation period on this site, so it gives us nice little snapshots. Many of the tell sites are built up over millennia. This one had a few hundred years that it was
00:40:23
Speaker
the biggest, strongest city in this part of Iraq, this part of Mesopotamia, and then the center power moved somewhere else. So yeah, so we do have a way of seeing snapshots through, but not through standing architecture, just through the differential way that the soil absorbs water.
00:40:46
Speaker
nice that's pretty cool that makes me think of a drone i saw god what was it a i don't know probably something on facebook but i have a feeling it was like an indiegogo thing or something like that but some kind of drone that was fully waterproof and in fact you could swap change it around somehow was a four four rotor quadcopter but
00:41:04
Speaker
You could change around somehow to actually change the position of the rotors or run it like literally underwater and almost like a submarine kind of thing. It was totally crazy. But anyway, that would be cool to actually take footage while it was raining because most of these drones, you know, have exposed electrical motors, which aren't so conducive to rain.
00:41:24
Speaker
It'll fly for a little while, but not too long. Wrapping up the tech aspect of this, do you know exactly how many pictures you guys took overall with the drum?
00:41:39
Speaker
I should know, but I don't know how many were on Lagash. I think it was over 15,000 just for Lagash. And the other ones, I was like the ziggurat, I took about just shy of 900. The same goes for the Royal Cemetery and for the Et Dubla Ma, which is a small building, I took a couple hundred.
00:42:01
Speaker
We did another, we also mapped a topographic map of a small tell that's right next to Lagash. And I want to say I did about 300 photos over that.
00:42:11
Speaker
But that's one of the nice things, the drone deploy, I don't have to tell it like, you know, how often do I have to, it's built into its own algorithm. So I tell them how high it is and what overlap I want. And it decides when it should take the pictures. And because with this drone, with the incredible GPS, well, satellite positioning, sorry, of it, are we allowed to use GPS generically like that? I don't know. I always do. I mean, it's, yeah, I think so.
00:42:36
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Because it's one of multiple systems is the GPS system versus GLONASS and Galileo and everything else. Well, GPS just means global positioning system. I mean, there might be one that's called that, but they're all of one. It's like, it's like Jell-O and Kleenex.
00:42:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. You're right. You're right. Don't get those two mixed up anyway. Yeah. Well, I'm wondering with the volume of photographs that you took, if you, were you offloading regularly from the, uh, from the drone SD cards? I mean, probably offloading just for data security reasons, but, or did you just bring enough cards out there that you were just, you know, swapping them out and when they get full?
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, so I was offloading them every time I flew, because I had either the late afternoon or lunchtime. So I offloaded them to an external drive all the time for data security. So I had a decent copy. I ended up having to swap cards a lot.
00:43:37
Speaker
because my cards kept on getting corrupted, the little micro SD cards. And at first I thought that it was a problem with the drone, but what it turned out was that I have, these are micro SD cards and so I've got to put them in a regular SD card reader. And those little adapters that convert a micro SD to a regular SD, they're just electrical. There's nothing smart about them, right? It's just wires. So I wouldn't have expected that could cause problems, but
00:44:07
Speaker
As I was working, I realized that the ones that I did with one card, which came with one of the new microSDs that we bought for the project versus the ones that I did with the adapter card that I brought, my own personal one, my personal one was breaking them.
00:44:23
Speaker
So I think that I must have worn out something in there and it was corrupting the cards, the micro SD cards, figured that out, threw away mine and just used the other one and we're good from there on out. But because of that, I had to cycle through a bunch of cards. Next time out, I'm probably going to recommend that they have maybe four cards and we just cycle through them. I might copy things multiple places. Having multiple copies of files is always
00:44:49
Speaker
a bit of a danger because then you don't know which is the current. But what I want is the hard drive, the external hard drive to be the reference, right? Everything that gets done ends up there in one copy in a file system structure that's labeled by date and by project. So there's no confusion as to what it represents. And then the cards, we can come and go. And then we hand the cards to multiple people on their way home so that if
00:45:17
Speaker
if something happens to the original or to somebody's card or whatever, we have the potential of having multiple backups. Gotcha. Nice. Well, in the last couple of minutes here, is there anything, I mean, you may potentially be going back in the spring, so you're probably already thinking about how you would do this a little bit differently. What would you do differently? What are some of the big things that you would do differently? A little bit of extra preparation, you know, more batteries? I mean, what would those things be?
00:45:44
Speaker
Yeah. So it worked really well for us. So there isn't a whole lot of change structurally. Reed asked me what kind of equipment we should get for next time. And so multiple SD cards purchased beforehand, probably like four of them, even though a 128 gigabyte SD card is probably going to be sufficient.
00:46:07
Speaker
If I've got four of them, I can copy all the data across to all four of them, replicate it four ways, give them to four different people so that when we come back home, especially if we come back on different flights, it minimizes the opportunity to lose the data. I would go with at least two hard drives. We only had one hard drive for the same reason, for data backup. I would myself be in charge of making sure that the data look right on all these, that they're all organizing the exact same way.
00:46:37
Speaker
Because if we give it to multiple people to do it, it's going to end up in multiple different structures, which is going to be confusing to somebody a couple years down the road as to what they're looking at. Is this the same project as this one? I don't know. Are they the same days? Maybe. We have tons of propellers because I said, hey, if we break them, we're not going to be able to get them there. So they bought more than we'll ever go through. And the other thing, I brought my own landing pad.
00:47:05
Speaker
So I'm going to recommend that they get one for the project. Yeah. Normally you wouldn't need it. And the way that the ground there dries, it kind of has a salt cap on it. So it doesn't kick up a whole lot of dust, but every now and then it does. And when it does, it kicks up a tremendous amount of dust. So having that landing pad is helpful. But in terms of like two hours staring at the sky is actually quite tiring.
00:47:30
Speaker
So two hour sessions works. And that's four batteries, which fits nicely in the backpack. And like I said, that also is basically the battery life of the battery that goes in the controller and in the mobile station. So that two hours, just in a lot of different respects, kind of fits nicely. So I don't think I would change anything with that.
00:47:53
Speaker
The only thing that would really, really improve my work there would be having faster internet, more reliable internet, and I don't know if that's possible. Next time, we'll probably be living in the village, not in the next bigger village over, not in the sticks where we were.
00:48:12
Speaker
which might improve our internet, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Yeah. Okay. Well, all right then. I think that probably does it for now. That was an awesome synopsis of that trip. Sounds like it was really fun and, and really just
00:48:30
Speaker
A great time and a great use of technology and got some side projects done too. That's pretty cool. I can't believe you got a 3D model of the Ziggurat. I got to see that. That's just amazing. Hopefully we can drop a link to that at some point and show our audience those. Any final thoughts on this before we close it out? No. Again, it was my side of the project.
00:48:53
Speaker
Maybe we'll get Redon to talk about the solar cores and what the technology is because they're doing some very interesting things to get really good radiocarbon dates out of what is tough to get good radiocarbon dates out of. He's working with scientists at Woods Hole on that.
00:49:11
Speaker
You know, it kind of does fit in with the with, you know, Archeotech. But my part just went so smoothly, aside from, you know, getting the drone confiscated at the start. And my experience there was everything I'd hoped for. You know, I really enjoyed Iraq. The people I worked with there were fantastic. I laughed my ass off the whole time because they have such a funny sense of humor.
00:49:40
Speaker
always, always just teasing each other and making jokes and whatnot. So it was, it was really delightful experience. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for taking us along that journey, Paul. And, uh, we will be back next time and hopefully we can get some, can get some links on here at some point, or we'll just drop them on another show or we'll,
00:50:00
Speaker
We'll share them in the APN feed if we get some of those links to the models. And for anybody listening to this in real time and happens to be in the United States, happy Thanksgiving. I'm going to go have some turkey. Ooh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got check on mine. Is it still gray? It might be. All right. Thanks, Paul. And thanks, everybody. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Chris. Bye.
00:50:29
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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlougal.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.
00:50:55
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.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:51:22
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 arkpodnet.com slash members for more info.