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LIDAR in Cambodia with Dr. Sarah Klassen - Ep 111
245 Plays6 years ago
It’s all LIDAR today! Paul and Chris interview Dr. Sarah Klassen, an archaeologist that has done extensive work in southeast Asia, specifically Cambodia. She’s got some fascinating things to say about what the LIDAR data told them about the past at Ankor Wat and other temples, and, about new questions the data presented.
LinksDr. Klaasen’s WebsiteApp of the DayWebby: Motion-X GPS UpdatePaul: Settings Sync for Visual Studio CodeContactChris WebsterTwitter: @archeowebbyEmail: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.comPaul ZimmermanTwitter: @lugalEmail: 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.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and
Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:20
Speaker
welcome to the archaeotech podcast episode 111. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to archaeologist Sarah Klassen about using lidar in Cambodia. Let's get to it. All right. As I mentioned in the introduction, our interviewee today is Dr. Sarah Klassen.
Sarah Klassen's Background
00:00:38
Speaker
She got her PhD from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona in 2018 and MA from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona from in 2013.
00:00:48
Speaker
and her BA in Anthropology with Honors and Religion from Dartmouth College in 2010. Dr. Claussen is currently a Social Studies and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Her current research project builds on new evidence suggesting that Angkor Wat was the central node in a complex urban network spreading across mainland Southeast Asia.
Lidar Discoveries in Cambodia
00:01:11
Speaker
In recent years, imagery from two lidar missions organized by the Cambodia Archaeological Lidar Initiative, or CALI, and the Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium, I love things that are called consortiums, and the Greater Angkor Project, or GAP, were used to map seven previously concealed and undocumented dense urban landscapes surrounded by much lower density peripheries.
00:01:30
Speaker
The revelation of these urban areas suggests that a complex web of agricultural and occupational spaces linking more densely inhabited urban nuclei may have been a ubiquitous defining feature of Khmer landscapes. So without further ado, let's get to the interview. All
Interest in Cambodian Studies
00:01:48
Speaker
right. Welcome to the show, everybody. Welcome, Paul. How are you doing today, Chris?
00:01:51
Speaker
Hi, not too bad, man. As we're recording this, it's probably middle of August. It's August 13th, and we had a weird cold spell in Reno, but we're back up to high temperatures, so I guess all is well with the world. There you go. All right, well, we have a guest today. Before I start though, I'm going to try my best in post-production, and maybe I've already done this, to remove this weird sound that is coming through the internet, and we can't figure out how to get rid of it.
00:02:17
Speaker
Apologies for that. We're just going to deal with it and move on, because hopefully the content wins out. And I think she's going to sound great anyway. So welcome to the show, Sarah. Hi. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. No problem. No problem. So our producer, Jamie, found you and brought you into the show. And she said we were going to talk specifically about some of your work in Cambodia. So why don't we just start off by asking what led you to Cambodia first off? So I'm an archaeologist. I graduated a couple of years ago with my PhD.
00:02:46
Speaker
Why Cambodia? I spent a year in Korea before I started graduate school and I was teaching English for a hog one out there and they actually went out of business two months before graduate school started. So I used that two months to travel around Southeast Asia and fell in love
00:03:05
Speaker
with the region during that time. So when I went to graduate school, I had to pick which area of the world I would focus on for a couple different reasons. I switched areas from the area that I originally went into grad school working on. And I thought, why not Southeast Asia? And it turned out there wasn't a ton of work being done in the United States by archaeologists working in the region. So I teamed up with a couple of the groups that were there, and the rest is history.
00:03:35
Speaker
Very nice, very nice.
Expertise in GIS and Water Management
00:03:37
Speaker
So how did you decide what you were going to study specifically in Cambodia? What led you to what we're going to talk about later? So I was specializing in GIS, geographic information system analysis and water management at the time. And the team that I'm now working with had just acquired LiDAR data over Angkor.
00:03:57
Speaker
So it's kind of perfect timing in that they had this data and I had the exact skills to work with the data. So it worked out perfectly. That's fortuitous. It is fortuitous, absolutely. So I was looking at your, you've got a very nice website, personal website with details about some of your work and so on. But right at the top, you have something that intrigues me. You say adaptive capacity and resilience.
00:04:21
Speaker
And I assume that these are central to what you're looking at in Cambodia, in and around Angkor Wat. What do you mean by these? So I was looking at the resilience of the water management system to shocks and stresses, especially climatic, but also social pressures. And resilience is a great word and it's a great concept and tool that not only archaeologists, but a lot of people dealing with human environmental interactions use all the time.
00:04:51
Speaker
But it can be a little bit difficult because it's so nebulous, so it can mean a lot of different things, resilience to blood, for example. So I use the concept of adaptive capacity to really break down what was going on with the water management system at anchor over time and test it against specific expectations. Okay.
00:05:10
Speaker
So
Angkor's Adaptive Water Systems
00:05:11
Speaker
adaptive capacity refers to the ability of a system to respond to and prepare for stresses in order to improve the overall condition. And then resilience is how it's actually adapted or didn't adapt correctly. Right, yeah. Resilience is kind of the overarching term and then looking at the adaptive capacity as kind of one component of resilience or one way to understand resilience. Right, so could you give us an example?
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah, so at Angkor, I looked at five different characteristics of the system. So the redundancy, the physical infrastructure, so the types of water management features that were built on the landscape, human capital, so the number of people in the system.
00:05:54
Speaker
and natural resources, so the amount of water that the water management system could store. And I looked at those over time and compared how they changed between periods. So when we knew that something political was going on, I could see what was different in the water management system during that time period.
00:06:13
Speaker
And then also there's a series of very severe monsoons and droughts near the end of the time period. So I can see what also is different in the water management system based on these different characteristics of adaptive capacity.
00:06:26
Speaker
What time period is this? This is the medieval period. Angkor thrived as the capital of the Khmer Empire between around 900 and 1300 CE. All right.
Understanding Lidar Technology
00:06:37
Speaker
Well, let's transition a little bit to Lidar. First, tell our listeners, because the Archeotech podcast, we like to educate and let people know what things are. I know we've talked about this before, but in your words, what is Lidar? Lidar is a technology that we use
00:06:52
Speaker
see what the ground surface looks like. The way that it works is we put the lidar device onto a helicopter and then flew it back and forth over the archaeological site and it sends down pulses and measures how long it takes those pulses to return. So the pulses
00:07:08
Speaker
go down and maybe bounce off a tree or bounce off the ground and then bounce back up to the device and it measures the time that it takes and that allows us to reconstruct what the different surfaces that these millions and millions and billions of little pulses are hitting.
00:07:25
Speaker
So even though the area is really densely forested and there are a lot of trees with a lot of leaves that these pulses are bouncing off of, some of them are getting in between the trees and reaching the ground and then bouncing back up from the ground. So that worked out to about
00:07:42
Speaker
two or three per cubic meter square, sorry. And then using those pulses that hit the ground, we can reconstruct what the ground looks like. So if you've ever been to Cambodia and been inside the Park of Angkor, you'll know that it's extremely dense. So if you're on the ground trying to understand what the surface of the ground looks like, it's incredibly difficult. We're in there with machetes, kind of hacking our way through, and even still the undergrowth is so dense you can barely see what's under your feet.
00:08:13
Speaker
So by using this data, we can strip all of that vegetation away and see what the ground looks like and what types of things were built there in the past. So the ground, that's actually really interesting to me because I've always never fully understood how the lidar saw through the vegetation, so to speak, because they always say, oh, it sees through vegetation, but really it's just
00:08:35
Speaker
randomly getting through the vegetation because of the sheer number of pulses that you're sending out right in probably multiple angles and directions. And then you're just building that picture, you know, piece by piece and then getting a picture of the ground. Is that an accurate statement? Absolutely. And then it also gives us a really clear picture of what the trees look like as well. So we're teaming up with, um, some individuals who work with different components of forestry and they were actually able to map different species of trees.
00:09:04
Speaker
And if you were to do this in the same area over different periods of time, you could track how the forest is growing and what types of species or trees are in different areas. That's pretty cool. So I'm a pilot and I know exactly how expensive helicopters and helicopter pilots can be.
Drones in Lidar Collection
00:09:25
Speaker
Not only that, but helicopter mounted LiDAR systems are probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't know how much they cost, but they got to be expensive. I'm sure you're renting this time on these sorts of things. Have you personally looked, I know you've already done some of the LiDAR research, but for future uses, have you looked at some of the drone mounted LiDAR systems and whether or not they would work in that area, or are they not quite up to snuff yet?
00:09:48
Speaker
No, we absolutely have looked into that because you're right. The most expensive thing about acquiring LiDAR is the time of the helicopter, the pilot and the helicopter itself. The equipment is expensive, but it's kind of a one-time rental fee cost. But we're really limited by the airtime, and then that limits a lot of other archaeological projects from being able to collect the data.
00:10:10
Speaker
So being able to use something like drone-mounted lidar would be much more cost-effective and would allow us to cover more areas in this region, but allow archaeologists to cover more areas elsewhere as well. So at the time, unfortunately, drones are really limited by their battery power, so lidar equipment is relatively heavy for a drone, and then fixed-wing
00:10:36
Speaker
fixed wing drones have a lot of restrictions to them as well in terms of where they can take off and land.
Non-Floodplain Construction Methods
00:10:44
Speaker
So unfortunately, we're not quite there yet, but I'm hoping that we will be there soon.
00:10:49
Speaker
nice you know something i was just thinking of we've talked about kite aerial photography before but i've never heard about like kite aerial lidar or anything like that i suppose that's just too heavy the lidar units aren't quite small enough right and you want to be able to have a pretty fixed grid at the lidar
00:11:07
Speaker
is collected on. Can't be bouncing around. Yeah. Right. Nice. So are you using other technologies like photogrammetry or infrared or anything else that is helping build this picture or are you relying solely on the on the LIDAR data?
00:11:21
Speaker
We absolutely are. So I'll give you a little bit of background to kind of lead into what we're doing with other types of technology. So the site of Angkor is in a flood plain. And because it was in a flood plain, instead of just building a house or a temple on the ground, they actually built, mounded up earth that they then built these structures on top of.
00:11:43
Speaker
So when we're looking at the LIDAR data, we're not actually looking specifically at houses. In some other areas of the world, like the Maya region, they're seeing house platforms in the LIDAR data. We're not seeing house platforms, we're seeing house mounds. So we're seeing the mound that they constructed that they then built a house upon. Or we're seeing the mound that they constructed and then built a temple upon. And these are very distinctive morphologies. So it's pretty easy to identify and map them from the LIDAR data.
00:12:14
Speaker
So this works really, really well in a floodplain like we have at Angkor. There are other sites in Cambodia that aren't on a floodplain, so naturally their construction techniques were a little bit different. So one of the other sites that I work at, Kalkar, is one of those examples. So when we got the LiDAR data, it was really useful for some types of features, but we weren't seeing house mounds and house ponds and grid-like patterns that we saw at Angkor.
00:12:42
Speaker
So the question there is, do they have a different type of occupational pattern or is it something that we're just not seeing because the LiDAR data isn't as well suited to this site?
00:12:56
Speaker
So we went back to CoCare earlier this year actually with ground penetrating radar and did a few grids. And it turns out that sure enough, it's just a different type of construction. So the same types of buildings are there, but they are underground instead of being built onto the ground. So what we did at CoCare is we had the LiDAR data. So we were able to use that to zero in on areas that we thought were interesting.
00:13:25
Speaker
compared to the other sites in Cambodia. So we would expect to see something there, but we're not seeing it there. Or, you know, it's just looking a little bit different than what we expect to see in different sites. So we're processing those results right now, but it's going to be pretty interesting and exciting once we have the final results from that. You must have quite a bit of historical data from that area on what, I guess, sites like this typically look like, right? So you're kind of planning on around that as well.
00:13:54
Speaker
Exactly, and we have the LiDAR data from the other sites in Cambodia as well. Right, right. I have a question for you here. These house and temple mounds that you're finding, these are earthen mounds, correct? Correct. Okay, and the buildings that would have been on them, what were those made of? And can you see their remains at all in LiDAR or are they totally obliterated?
00:14:18
Speaker
So some of the temples are built with brick and stone but those more durable materials were limited to temples, the houses of the gods. So the houses of the everyday folk like you and I and even the king were built of
00:14:35
Speaker
And unfortunately, wood doesn't preserve very well in the archaeological record. So when my colleagues have excavated some of these house mounds, they've found post mounds so we can see where the houses would have been, but we don't have very much left from the actual houses themselves. That makes sense.
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah. But the temples, for example, all, for the most part, all have moats around them. So they form kind of this horseshoe mound with a moat surrounding a square mound in the middle and then a little walkway leading into it. So it looks, looks like a horseshoe and it's pretty easy to identify those using the LiDAR data. I mean, is this a moat that would like legit been filled with water or something?
00:15:21
Speaker
It would have been filled with water in the past and many of them still are today. They're used as rice fields because they're collecting water naturally. I mean, the moats were probably protect. I don't know why I'm focusing on moats. It's very interesting. You don't hear moats very often. I'm just imagining something in my head like they're actually filled with spikes and deadly animals or something like that because we're probably protective. I mean, I don't know if there's any evidence of that or if they're just a water channel.
00:15:51
Speaker
Most of them, they're probably not protected. They may have been filled with some deadly sneaks and things like that. But the primary purpose is probably not protection. Later on at Angkor Wat, because Angkor Wat has a large mood around it, and so does Angkor Tom. It looks as though it may have been used as a fortress, but that's later on in time, not when it was initially built.
00:16:15
Speaker
What's the scale of these structures? They vary widely. Angkor Wat, as you probably know, is one of the largest religious monuments in the world. It's absolutely massive. In addition to Angkor Wat, there are about 100 other large temples built of stone, which are pretty beautiful and spectacular in their own right.
00:16:37
Speaker
And then in addition to that, we've identified over a thousand other smaller community temples. So these would be like a local church or something in the United States. And those are much smaller. And when we go and investigate them, there'll be a few pieces of stands down and some brick, but not as much as the other larger state temples.
00:16:57
Speaker
Well, what, I mean, what kind of questions is, I mean, you've already talked about some of the stuff like your processing the results from the data that you've collected, but what are some other, I guess, high level questions that this is bringing up that you can speak to right now?
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, so the LiDAR really is transforming our understanding of the archaeological site of Angkor. So I don't know if you've seen any of the LiDAR imagery or if we can make that available to listeners of the podcast. I suppose actually you can just Google LiDAR at Angkor in a couple of really good images.
00:17:28
Speaker
made by my colleague, Damian Evans, will pop up right away. But you can see that inside the areas around Angkor Tom and Angkor Wat, there are very clearly defined urban grids.
Urban Planning at Angkor Wat
00:17:41
Speaker
So there are city blocks that are divided by causeways or roadways that may or may not have flooded during the wet season.
00:17:50
Speaker
and then a series of house mounds and house ponds within the city blocks. So this raises a lot of questions in terms of the urban form of the city and how it developed over time. So for example, Angkor Wat is very regular. So each city block within Angkor Wat has, I think,
00:18:10
Speaker
six house mounds and six ponds and it's very regular and it was clearly laid out and planned all at the same time. Whereas some of the areas around Angkor Tom are more complex and the city blocks are all a little bit different from each other and you can see how they've been changed and adapted over time.
00:18:28
Speaker
All right. Well, on that note, I think we will take our first break and then we will come back on the other side and continue this discussion about LiDAR with Sarah Klassen. Back in a second. Chris Webster here for the Archeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts
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00:20:03
Speaker
All right, welcome back to episode 111. And we were discussing LIDAR in Cambodia with Sarah Klassen. And let's talk about LIDAR a little more because you can see so much with LIDAR. How can LIDAR help you see changes over time on the landscape? I'm assuming older features, different things, but can you describe what that looks like?
00:20:24
Speaker
So LIDAR can help us see changes over time in a couple of different ways, some more or less indirect than others. So LIDAR doesn't give us C14 dates for things, for example, but we can see relative chronological indications. So if something's built over something else, we can sometimes see that in the LIDAR data. So you can see where one channel
00:20:49
Speaker
crosses over a channel that was clearly there first. Or you can see where, you know, a mound or a pond was here and they kind of re-figured it to its present form.
00:21:01
Speaker
It can also help us identify areas that are more complex than other areas of the landscape. So for Angkor Wat, for example, because it's so clearly laid out, it looks pretty, pretty sure that it was built during one construction phase. That's been tested now with archaeological excavations. And that's compared to other areas like around Angkor Tom, where there's so much complexity in the urban form.
Angkor's Poly-nucleated Development
00:21:31
Speaker
that it looks like the space was shaped and reshaped over time. Building something like that in one construction event, you know, like one construction period, that sounds monumental. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And you keep entering, you know, I think everybody's probably heard of Anchor Watt, and then you mentioned Anchor Tom, if I'm pronouncing that right. What does, does anchor just mean like city or temple or something like that?
00:21:59
Speaker
Right. So Angkor is, it's referred to as the city and as specific areas in the city. So Angkor Wat, Wat means temple. Okay. And then Angkor Tom is more of a complex that was established as Angkor Tom by Jayavarman the seventh shortly after the construction of Angkor Wat. Ah, okay. Okay. I see.
00:22:23
Speaker
So Angkor Tom is a large walled city as it were. And within that city, there are city blocks where people would have been living. And then there are also a series of different temples as opposed to Angkor Wat, which is really just one large temple. And how many different sites are you able to do comparative studies on there with the, with your LIDAR data? So Angkor itself, it's really complex. It's not really,
00:22:52
Speaker
kind of one urban area or one site, it's really a number of poly nucleated sites. So one large temple was built in one area and that kind of became the nucleus of the archeological site. And then another large temple was built 50 years later, 100 years later. And then attention shifted over into that area, but it all blends together over time. And then in addition to that, we've collected LiDAR data
00:23:20
Speaker
And a number of other really significant archaeological sites and temples in Cambodia. And the LiDAR data there was also very revealing in that it showed that these areas were not just temples. They actually had large areas of occupation as well. Interesting.
00:23:37
Speaker
that you seem to have been interested in lots of things over there, which I can understand. I mean, Southeast Asia in this area in particular sounds just like there's a multitude of questions that need answers to. And one of the things I noticed on your website was what an image of under your publications tab, which seems to be a poster, I think, or something like that that you did for ASU. But it's talking about pedestal typology at Angkor.
00:24:04
Speaker
I mean, I can see these pedestals, but describe for our audience and our listeners who, you know, obviously have audio media, maybe we can put some pictures up or a link to this. But, um, what do you mean by these pedestal typologies and why is this so important? I see five different styles, I think here, or at least four, and then a style B. For my dissertation, it was really important to be able to date all of those smaller kind of community temples. So the, the temples that I was referring to before, that would be similar to a church in the middle of a small town in America, for example.
00:24:34
Speaker
And that was important to me because these temples are the nexus of smaller communities on the landscape, smaller agricultural communities. So if I was
Dating Temples and Land Use
00:24:43
Speaker
able to date those temples, then I would also be able to date the surrounding agricultural land because we can actually see where rice fields are associated with specific temples.
00:24:54
Speaker
you can see traces of these ancient field systems on the landscape. And one of my colleagues, Scott Hawkins, mapped those for his dissertation and did a few analyses with them. So for my dissertation, I wanted to understand how the landscape was utilized over time. And that included which areas were being used for agriculture during different time periods. So the pedestals became important because almost every temple has a pedestal left.
00:25:23
Speaker
So regardless of how large the temple was inside of it would have been a statue or a linga that would have been on a pedestal. So I was hoping that by designing or kind of sorting out the typology for pedestals that would help me
00:25:39
Speaker
be able to date the different temples. So we did find a few different types of pedestals, which was actually useful. So now we can start classifying different pedestals into different types. It was useful for dating in that I could add it to a bunch of other attribute data that we had for the temples. And then using the aggregate of all of that data, I designed a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm.
00:26:07
Speaker
with a colleague and that using that algorithm we were able to predict temple dates with an average absolute error of around 50 years. So then I was able to go back and look at which temples were built where on the landscape and how that compared to different epicenters. So these large state temples that are being built by the king in different areas during different time periods and the large water management features.
00:26:33
Speaker
Isn't it amazing how something as relatively simple as these pedestals, the styles are not really repeated through time? We see that with projectile point technology and different shapes and things like that over here in North America and around the world. I'm just amazed that somebody 300 years later didn't say, hey, that old one over there looks really neat. Let's make a pedestal that looks exactly like that now.
00:26:58
Speaker
The interesting thing is sometimes they do, but it doesn't look exactly the same. So it's kind of similar to how styles come back. So like the 70s, the bell bottoms came back, I think in the 90s when I was in elementary school, bell bottoms were really cool again.
00:27:15
Speaker
But they weren't the exact same. They had like little differences in them that if you were trying to do a typology of genes, you'd be able to notice the difference between a bell bottom from the 70s and a bell bottom from the 90s. So the things like that happen archaeologically all the time, which can actually be confusing for archaeologists. But usually there are subtle differences that we can pick up on and realize that, oh, that's actually just a tie back to an earlier style.
00:27:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, indeed. Man, it's still pretty interesting though. And I'm sure somebody has done a typology of jeans. I have no doubt. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Or even Coke bottles. So every now and then Coca-Cola will come out with some, you know, like an old fashioned branding and bring back an old bottle style, which, you know, it's nostalgic for people and probably sells more bottles of Coke.
00:28:10
Speaker
But in that case, and probably with other things similar to these pedestals and everything else, technology to create these things changes well. You look at historic artifacts. I never really was a historic artifacts kind of guy until I moved to Nevada and had to be when you're dealing with old mining sites. It's literally the only thing that can help date these sites.
00:28:30
Speaker
You can have a style recreated from a 1930s Coke bottle recreated in 2015, but you're going to be able to tell that that was done on an automatic bottle machine and it's going to have the different marks. It might be a similar shape, but you can tell the technology that was used to create it by the way the glass looks. And I'm sure it's the same thing with some of these older stone pedestals and even buildings and things like that. They may look the same, but the technology to create them was different. Exactly. Yeah. And archaeologists can usually pick up on those.
00:29:00
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Those little changes. Nice. Nice. Well, speaking of technology, what's, what's next for you in the next field season? I mean, what's the, what's the season like out there? Did you go out there this summer? Um, or are you headed out there soon? So I was out there earlier this year at Cucare collecting the ground penetrating radar. So we're working on writing up the results from that. Now we have to write a report and submit that. And then once we do that, we're hoping to go back and investigate some of the things that we found.
00:29:30
Speaker
using the grand penetrating radar. And what's, uh, what's on the hook for next year? Have you planned that out yet? I'm hoping to get back next year, probably still working at Cook air. I have an agreement with them to work at that archeological site for a couple of years. That's also a really, really interesting area. So anchor gets a lot of attention because of anchor a lot.
00:29:54
Speaker
But Calcare is interesting in and of its own. It was the only other city to become capital of the Khmer Empire by Jayavarman IV. So traditional narratives up to about a decade ago.
00:30:08
Speaker
from inscriptions suggested that Jayavarman IV kind of built this city in the middle of nowhere because he wanted to change and move the capital from Angkor to Kocher. And we're now learning that actually this site had a long period of occupation before the period when it was capital and a long period of occupation afterwards. So it's pretty complex and trying to sort out what
00:30:31
Speaker
led to the Capitol being moved there and why that site in particular and then why only for such a short period of time. It's all very interesting. There are a lot of questions to be asked and answered at that site. What do you think in your estimate is sort of the
00:30:49
Speaker
the biggest unanswered question of that area. Maybe it's something that just interests you, but looking at the entire area, what is something that's just, man, we can't figure it out yet and you really want to know the answer. Is there anything that really sticks out? Yeah. So one
Residential Patterns in CoCare
00:31:04
Speaker
of the things that we're trying to get the bottom up is where do people live? And we have a general idea
00:31:11
Speaker
of where the palace would have been and there are some indications of occupation around around there. One of my colleagues did a couple of seasons excavating at the palace kitchen actually among other other areas but it doesn't have the same urban morphology as Angkor so we don't see those city blocks in really regular patterns as we do at Angkor. So that's one big question is who is living there? How many people were living there?
00:31:40
Speaker
What were they doing and how were they living? Did they have the same types of houses I think? Or was it something completely different? I always think of China in particular as having like a really rich and detailed written history going back several thousand years. That's clearly not necessarily the case for the area you're in because you mentioned, you know, 900 to I think 1300 years for Angkor Wat and which, you know,
00:32:09
Speaker
in time estimates is really not that far ago not that long ago so either are there just no written records or historical accounts or anything like that that have been written down either in stone or in paper or scrolls or something like that and then if not like what happened to it all because it sounds like they would have kept those sorts of records from just a city and a government basis but it doesn't sound like you have that to draw from we have some inscriptions from temples they're useful
00:32:38
Speaker
in the ways that they were written to be useful. So a lot of it concerns land rights and land sales. And because they're in temples, a lot of the inscriptions are about who founded the temple and who paid for the founding of the temple to make sure that credit is given where credit is due. But we don't have historical narratives in the way that some areas of the world
00:33:07
Speaker
do. That would make our lives a lot easier. But we do have some things. So we know which kings were ruling when and the royal lineages and things like that. And when using that information, we're able to date a lot of some of the different temples with inscriptions based on which king was reigning during that time period and things like that. So the inscription, we do have some inscriptions and they are useful in some ways.
00:33:35
Speaker
but not as useful perhaps as we would like in other ways. Yeah. Okay. Well, good luck with all that. So I had to say.
00:33:46
Speaker
Yeah, one of the temples actually took from, it has some really interesting inscriptions because it goes into detail about how many people were living in the temple and how many people were working to support the temple and how many dancers were full-time residents at the temple. And for that temple in particular, I think it was in the neighborhood of 6,000 dancers. So you can just imagine the amount of people that go into
00:34:14
Speaker
that went into the building projects that were at the magnitude of the building projects in the Kmer Empire. They have 6,000 temples. I like to think about stuff like that, like those inscriptions. These are inscriptions in stone. Did I mention all this stuff? Yeah. On the walls of the temple.
00:34:33
Speaker
So some guy was told, Hey, could you write down all this? Just like really boring data and take like the next five weeks or something like that to just put this in stone. Right. Exactly how much rice we need from each smaller temple that's, you know, involved in the system so that we can feed all of our 6,000 dancers.
00:34:55
Speaker
That's right. That's right. We need to get this in stone, like literally write this in stone right now. So these big construction projects are being orchestrated by the Kings. Is there a sense of other construction projects being done more as community or individual projects, or is it all in these urban areas orchestrated by the people in charge?
00:35:19
Speaker
Do you know the answer to that? Does anybody know the answer to that? I can't open any questions. So some of the mid-sized temples and some of the kind of mid-sized to large temples we know were commissioned by non-royal elites or family members of the royal family.
Political Dynamics of Temple Commissions
00:35:41
Speaker
So that is one thing that we're interested in looking into a little bit.
00:35:47
Speaker
more closely and how that changes over time. So is there, you know, during the period of Jayavarman VII, essentially all of the large constructions are under the name of Jayavarman VII, whereas a couple hundred years earlier
00:36:01
Speaker
there are a number of different fairly large temple constructions being commissioned, supervised, or at least like non-royal elites are taking credit for them. So that's just a lot in terms of the political organization. And it looks like there's some dynamics shift a little bit over time in terms of the centralization of power.
00:36:28
Speaker
Okay. Well, we are just about at the end of this, Sarah. Thanks for all this information. This has been just fascinating. I love that area and we don't have enough podcasts about that area of the world, to be honest. So it's nice to hear about what's going on over there. What's next for you in your career? I noticed that you're at your current post for a couple of years, according to your website, but what's after that? Where would you like to go after that? Do you want to keep studying in Cambodia and answering questions or are there other areas of the world that you want to move to?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, we have obviously a lot of work left to do in Cambodia. I don't have a great international team working there. So we work a lot with Cambodian archaeologists and also teams from Australia and the UK and a couple other teams in the United States. So it's a really great group of people. And in general, we're pretty happy to work with each other and do comparative analyses between the different sites that people are working on and kind of combining specialties there.
00:37:27
Speaker
My colleague, Damian Evans, is also in the process of collecting more LiDAR data in other tropical forest environments in Southeast Asia. And
Future of Lidar Studies in Southeast Asia
00:37:38
Speaker
with that data, we'll be able to do some really cool comparative analyses looking at what urbanism looks like across the region. So not just restricted to today's contemporary border of Cambodia, but across Southeast Asia. So exciting work is in the near future.
00:37:56
Speaker
in terms of doing more regional comparative studies.
00:38:00
Speaker
All right, well, speaking of Australia, one of our sponsors and previous podcast guests, Simon Young of Lithodemos VR, they're out of Australia.
3D Reconstructions of Angkor Wat
00:38:11
Speaker
They do these basically 3D reconstructions, I guess, of different sites. They focus on a lot of classical sites, like Rome and across Italy and other places like that. And then you can use, you basically download an app on your phone and you can experience via like the Google Cardboard in VR
00:38:30
Speaker
or something like that, the area, and there's like sounds, and you can tap on things on a map and hear an audio, almost like an audio tour. Sounds like you guys already have all the data they would need to do that for AnchorWatt, and I'm not sure if they've been up there yet, so I might have to get in touch with them.
00:38:46
Speaker
I think Google did a walkthrough, so you can go onto the website. It's not virtual reality that I know of, but it's kind of cool that you can kind of walk around and click on different areas and look a little bit closer. So technology is really changing the way that people can visit a lot of these archaeological sites, making it a lot more accessible.
00:39:07
Speaker
Okay. Cool. All right. Well, we will include a link to your website on the show notes for this page. And, uh, for those that want to just go there now, it's www.sarahclausen.ca. So go there, check it out. And we might pull some things off of there and put them on the show notes page. So you can see that over at art pod net.com forward slash archeotek forward slash one, one, one for episode one 11.
00:39:33
Speaker
So Sarah, thanks for coming on the show and I hope you get some great data analysis from what you did this year and some great data in the future years. Thanks for coming. Thank you for having me.
00:39:48
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:40:08
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archiotech podcast, episode 111. And this is the app of the day segment. And I'm going to go ahead and head off with an update. A couple episodes ago, I talked about MotionX GPS and it's pretty versatile application for doing pretty much whatever you want, but I had some, some pretty high level fundamental issues with it. One of the ones was I couldn't understand why it wasn't really accessing my cached maps all the time because I had cached maps and, but I was in a really weak service area and it was just showing me that like grid format that everybody's used to seeing when there is no map.
00:40:38
Speaker
And it was really irritated me because I'm like, I cashed this map. Why isn't it just showing it to me? Another thing I couldn't figure out right away was how to move waypoints into folders I'd created. And then the final thing was how to display all those waypoints on a map at the same time.
00:40:53
Speaker
I'm specifically working with a NOAA marine map of Lake Tahoe right now. My wife and I spent some time traveling around Lake Tahoe by boat. I wanted a way to basically sort waypoints into boat ramps, gas docks, places where you can go to the bathroom, places that are restaurants you can dock up to.
00:41:13
Speaker
beaches that we found that you can just go places to sleep on the lake, things like that. And this is applicable to archaeology, of course, because you might have different sites that you've ported in through a KML file and imported in here. Maybe you want to display all the prehistoric sites or all the historic sites or maybe all the sites in one region or one survey area, or maybe all the sites recorded by a specific crew chief or something like that, however you're going to organize those. So I actually
00:41:39
Speaker
Shortly after we recorded that episode, I figured all that stuff out. I had to do some research online and I got lucky with some other stuff. So let me tell you about the cached maps first off. This app has a setting in the settings where you can actually turn off, and it's in the main menu settings, but you can turn off the map data. So I think they intended for updating map data. I think they intend that to actually save
00:42:09
Speaker
How should I say it? Save data rates, I guess. So you can say, I don't want to update my maps right now. But when that's turned on,
00:42:16
Speaker
it will default to that. So that's what it was trying to do since I had a very weak service all the way around the lake. Uh, I never really had no service, but when I had no service, the map worked actually fine. That should have been my first clue. But when I had weak service, it would try to update that map regardless of the fact that there's a cached map and it wouldn't show me anything right there because it was, it was weak enough that it was trying to update it, but too weak to actually update it. Gotcha.
00:42:39
Speaker
So the minute I turned map data off, my cached map appeared and never went away. And it was perfect, you know, and it was great. So that was nice. The next thing, waypoints.
00:42:54
Speaker
You, it has two default folders for waypoints. Um, and then there's a bunch of other default folders as well. But two of the main ones are all waypoints and recently added waypoints. And if anybody knows how to do this, let me know, but I couldn't find a way to actually add a waypoint straight into a folder. So there's nothing in the, in the attributes about the waypoint when you create it, about what folder it should be in, nothing like that. So the workflow is tap tap twice on the screen to bring up the new waypoint dialogue.
00:43:22
Speaker
give it a new name, you can move it around, do whatever, and then you create the waypoint. And then you can actually add some notes about the waypoint. You can add a photograph and the photograph shows up in the map view, which is pretty cool. But to move that into a folder, again, this is the way that I found to do it, is in the waypoint screen, there's what's called the hamburger icon, the three little lines. And you basically
00:43:45
Speaker
You can't do it from just any of the screens. I usually go into the recently added because that's where the point is. It's right there. And then I select move waypoints and then all of them become selectable if they're in whatever's in recently added. And you can just select the ones you want and then hit choose folder and then choose the folder and move those into those.
00:44:04
Speaker
So that becomes super easy there. Now, if I want to see all the waypoints because it was showing me, I know there's some algorithm, but it was showing seemingly like random waypoints, right? I don't know if it was the last like 10 I had accessed or something like that, but I couldn't figure out any rhyme or reason to which waypoints it was actually showing me on the map. And it was really irritating. But if you go to, let's see, I'll go back to the map in case you happen to be following along.
00:44:30
Speaker
If you're in the map view and you click on the hamburger icon in the upper left-hand corner, there's four places down under map options. There's one called signs, and it's got this little familiar teardrop kind of shape that you're used to seeing on Google Maps and stuff as its icon. You go into signs and then there's a show all, a hide all, group nearby signs, and then there's waypoint signs and track signs. And if you go into waypoint signs,
00:44:56
Speaker
What they're calling signs are actually the waypoint icons, and that's something I just I'd never heard them called signs before. So if I go into there, all I can I can now look at just specifically waypoints. I can show all my waypoints that are saved on this device. I can hide all the waypoints.
00:45:13
Speaker
I can show certain types of waypoints, I can show certain map waypoints, and I can show certain folder waypoints. So I've got Lake Tahoe ramps, Lake Tahoe sleeping, Lake Tahoe anchor points, Lake Tahoe beaches, Lake Tahoe gas, food, bathrooms. The confusing thing is if I click on one of those, it doesn't change the word show to hide. It doesn't add a check mark to it or anything like that. So the only way to know that you've actually done it with any confidence is to just hide everything. So click hide all at the top.
00:45:40
Speaker
and then go back and tap individually on the folders that you want to show and then go back to your map and you'll see that they're showing. So not a very good UI for that, to be honest. They should have a little check mark for ones that are constantly showing. And the nice thing is it auto updates. So if I say show all ramps and then I add a boat launch to one of those folders, it will permanently stay on there because I already said show all ramps. I don't have to go back in there and click it again or something like that.
00:46:06
Speaker
So again, very useful once you figure out how to do all this and that the app just became infinitely more useful to me once I figure all that stuff out and it was really beneficial when we went out this last weekend and And highly useful from that standpoint and I think not having that knowledge has prevented me from using it in the field before which is why I went to GPS tracks because GPS tracks just kind of does some of this stuff naturally and in a way better UI but
00:46:33
Speaker
One downside of GPS tracks is it seems like when I go into a folder and I want to show all waypoints, and let's say there's 400 waypoints in there, which I just did last April, there was a ton of waypoints in there from this project I was on because we imported them all through a KML file. I mean, it would crash like five times in a row before it actually did it.
00:46:51
Speaker
Like the app would just crash and couldn't handle it. But this one doesn't seem to do that. Like I hit show all waypoints and there's probably 600 waypoints in here from different things because I was just messing around with it. And it's fine. It just, okay, yeah, no problem. I'm just going to display those for you. So they each have their pluses and minuses, but this one, this one just became a lot more effective for me and I'm pretty happy with what it can do. So.
00:47:15
Speaker
I was just going to ask you how it compared against GPS tracks, specifically because of that ease of learning and discovery. Long time ago, I settled on my reasons for liking certain programs or programming languages or anything, which is simply if it thinks the way I do.
00:47:35
Speaker
If it thinks the way I do, then I use it because I don't have this friction of trying to figure out what the programmers intended. They were thinking more along the same lines as I was and things come along naturally. I don't have to learn a program. It just comes more or less naturally. It seems like GPS tracks definitely comes along more naturally for you, but this technical difficulty that's happening with the number of waypoints.
00:48:02
Speaker
tips you, I guess, a little more towards MotionX GPS now. Yeah, I think it's what I really would need it for. For archaeology, I almost still have to use GPS tracks because I paid the subscription to get the other datums. That's one thing I haven't really experimented with in MotionX GPS yet is, can I switch it to... I can switch to UTM's for sure, but can I switch it to say NAT-83 or off of WGS-84 or something like that? I think I can, but it's just
00:48:32
Speaker
There's a lot more options for that, specifically in GPS tracks. So again, right out for the right time. And you're right, I think GPS tracks kind of fits with how my brain works too a little better. That's why I was having such a mind block with Motionx GPS and their terminology and how they use stuff. And I'm not sure why that was, but that's totally spot on. Yeah. Well, I've definitely felt that before with plenty of programs where one fits and one doesn't just because of my expectations coming in.
00:48:59
Speaker
The other thing just briefly is the data where you were in bad service areas. I think that we probably all experienced that like when you walk out of the house and you're checking your email really quick before you get in the car and you're at the edge of your house's Wi-Fi.
00:49:15
Speaker
And it just sits there spinning on you. And so then you go and you turn off Wi-Fi and it jumps over to the cell signal and your email comes in. So now that you mentioned that as a problem, it's obvious in retrospect why it would do that. But of course, when you're on the boat and you're trying to find a place to pee really badly, I could see. I mean, wait a sec. Why do you have bathrooms marked for your boat? Isn't the whole lake technically?
00:49:42
Speaker
Well, there's certain bathroom functions that are easier in a lake. Okay. You're out there for two and a half. Now we have, we have a porta potty on the boat, but my wife refuses to let me use it because it's literally under our heads where we sleep. The head under your head.
00:50:01
Speaker
the head under the head. Yeah. So we, we have it there. It's mostly it's a just in case for emergencies. I haven't even bought like the chemical stuff you can put in there that supposed to cut down on smell and break down solid products a little better. Um, but either way,
00:50:17
Speaker
It's going to smell like something, like a chemical can't smell too good either. So I don't know if we're ever going to use that. But if you have a catastrophe, maybe they'll use that. But of course, maybe you just jump in the lake too. Hey, it's really warm over here. Oh, OK. Sorry for going there. Not really.
00:50:39
Speaker
So I don't actually have an app this time. What I've got is a little bit of an update on something I mentioned, I think, on one of the first podcasts that I was co-hosting on. So I was talking about text editors and talking about the praises of Visual Studio Code. And a good year and a half later, it's still my preferred text editor. I'm hearing about it a lot. I mean, it seems to be the default one for a lot of different programmers at this point.
00:51:04
Speaker
One of my coworkers started using it not for programming, but for to-do lists of all things, just because it's such a capable text editor and really good for. And I realized that as this program is getting more useful and better and has more and more people using it, that there are lots of thousands probably of different extensions for it. And there's one in particular that has really made it
00:51:29
Speaker
extremely easy for me to use. And that one is called Setting Sync. It's not an obscure one. A lot of people know about it. But basically, I have on my work computer, I've got my work profile, and I have my login for my personal stuff.
00:51:45
Speaker
I have a personal computer that sits at home that's got my entire world on it. I've got another computer that sits down on my workbench in case I have a programming project to do there. I use Visual Studio Code on all four different profiles and I've got a bunch of different configurations I've done. The scheme that I like, the theme,
00:52:11
Speaker
The fonts that I'm using, the different extensions I'm using, whether things go to tabs or spaces, if you automatically put the lines at the end of the text, just a whole bunch of little tweaks that I've done. And the settings sync allows me to have
00:52:28
Speaker
each one of these instances of this program all had the exact same layout, which is really huge because getting it just tweaked just so takes a lot of effort and a lot of use. And so before I knew about setting sync, what would happen is I'd be working on my work profile and it was the one that I use most frequently for programming.
00:52:50
Speaker
and it would be just right. Then I'd go home and I'd try to do something and it wouldn't do it the same way or it would look a little different or it did something wrong. I had different key bindings, for example, and it was very frustrating. Anyhow, the settings, it uses GitHub, it uses GitHub Gists, which I have no idea what exactly they are. The setup used to be a real pain, but in the last major release, 3.4, I believe,
00:53:15
Speaker
They kind of set up a GUI of sorts. So when you go into the settings, there are a couple buttons that you click in succession and it imports the settings and then you can just fire up a panel like you do for anything that you do in Visual Studio Code.
00:53:30
Speaker
and then either upload or download the synced settings. And so now all four different profiles I have are all beautifully synced together and they all work really nicely and I have no friction going between computer A and computer B and just sitting down and getting back to work.
00:53:46
Speaker
Well, good. I love that. I use iCloud and all my Apple devices for very similar things, you know, to unify desktops and all that stuff. And I just love the ease with which that can be done if you know what you're doing in a lot of cases. Same thing with the app I was talking about, MotionX GPS. Well, GPS tracks anyway. I need to discover that with MotionX GPS because GPS tracks has iCloud sync. And then I actually recently purchased the desktop version of that so you can do work on the desktop. And then it just,
00:54:14
Speaker
You just hit the iCloud sync button. It syncs it up to the cloud. Next time you open your mobile device, you've got all the changes and it's way easier to work in that environment. So I can appreciate that for sure.
00:54:24
Speaker
Yeah, well, I don't think that they'd be able to do iCloud sync for Visual Studio Code. Maybe somebody has an extension that does that, but that'd be limited then just to your Apple devices. Sure, sure. And Visual Studio Code, one of the nice things is it's cross-platform. So I don't use it on Windows because I don't use Windows for any work, just some servers at work, but I use it on Macs and I use it on Linux devices, Linux computers that I use every now and then. So it just brings it all together.
00:54:53
Speaker
Nice, nice. Cool. Okay. Well, I think that's it, right? Yeah, I'm good. All right. Sounds good. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Um, if you've got any topic ideas, of course, uh, send them over to us. If you've got any questions, send those to us. I'd love to have a just pure listener question and answer show, uh, every once in a while. So, uh, occasionally we will get emails and we usually handle those all at once. But if we had a slightly higher volume of emails, then we would, um, we would.
00:55:22
Speaker
take those in stride. You can always click on whatever application you're using to listen to this on if it's on a mobile device. Take a look at the show notes and our contact information is in there. You can get my email address, Paul's email address, and our Twitter handles right there. We'll take any form of communication and we usually ask you if we can use your name or we might just remove your name anyway from the show.
00:55:47
Speaker
Feel free to be open and honest and tell us what you think about different things. We didn't say drone too much, so you shouldn't need too much yet in order to listen to this. We almost got by with it. You only said it once.
00:55:57
Speaker
I know, I know. I had to say it at least once with her, with Sarah, so we got that in. We covered it. So anyway, yeah, I think that's all I've got for this week. Yeah, I'm just going to reiterate what you were saying about listener comments, questions, comments, criticisms, all of the above is fair. If we've misstated something, if we've reviewed an app and missed major features for it, by all means, let us know. I mean, it's all good content.
00:56:23
Speaker
We come up here and we bloviate sometimes, but we're not necessarily the experts on everything. We certainly don't want to be seen as the sole experts on anything. We want this to be more of a discussion amongst ourselves and people who know a lot more about a lot more things than we could possibly know, the two of us, and turn it around and bring it back out as content for other people who likewise are interested.
00:56:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well stated. So, okay. Well, I think we will call it right there then. And we'll be back next time. I don't know what our new producer has in store for us, but we will see. I know she had some things on the hook, so we'll see. I'm pretty excited to have some regular content rolling in. So thanks for that. Thanks, Paul. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Chris. See you.
00:57:11
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 paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:57:37
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:57:58
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.