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Why archaeology will be the next harbor for technology - Ep 166
226 Plays4 years ago
Paul and Chris talk about a Heritage Daily article that seems a bit starry-eyed about the role of archaeology in current and future technological innovations and use. The article linked below broadly discusses a number of technologies and we take a few of them and break them down.
Links
- Why archaeology will be the next harbour for technology
- Drone Archaeology
- Agent Based Modeling for Archaeology
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- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
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 Topic: Technology in Archaeology
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 166. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we discuss an article that proposes archeology as the next harbor for technology. Let's get to it. All right, welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going? It's going pretty good.
00:00:41
Speaker
For a good month or so, I was complaining about not having any work and now I have too much work. This has been a lot
Excitement for Drone Mapping in Iraq
00:00:48
Speaker
of fun. I've been flexing my archaeological muscles again and I think I mentioned, but maybe I didn't. In a couple days, I'm flying off to Iraq to go do some work inside of Lagash and I am thrilled.
00:01:00
Speaker
Nice. I hope to get some awesome reports back from Iraq when you're done there. We'll definitely talk about it. Maybe even bring you on to the archaeology show, if listeners to the show aren't familiar with that. It's a show I do with my wife now, who's also an archaeologist. And we talked
00:01:15
Speaker
sites like that, right? No, no technical talk or anything like that. We just talk about the basics and things and sometimes news articles and stuff like that. So it'd be awesome to get you on the archaeology show to talk about your experiences over there and the archaeology over there. And then maybe we'll have a debrief on the archaeo tech podcast about what you did over there and some of the other techie type things that you guys did. Yeah. The techie kind of stuff that we're going to be doing there. My job is to be flying a drone. Oh, and that's new since last time I took 107 exam and passed it.
00:01:44
Speaker
Nice. So I'll be legal to fly drones for non-recreational purposes in the US. Well, I am already. I've got my temporary permit in the end. But I'll be doing that on this project in Iraq. I'm going to be making a new map of the site using photogrammetry. And we'll see. This has been a bit of a mix up with the drone. We'll see which kind of drone I'm going to be using. But we've got that. And then the other archaeologist that's going out there is working on his dissertation. And he's looking at the
00:02:13
Speaker
extension of the land where the Tigris and Euphrates join out and dump into the Persian Gulf because that coastline has been extending over the millennia in the same way that the Mississippi River Delta has expanded. So he's looking at the soils there, so he's doing a number of cores. So we'll have some techie stuff to talk about.
00:02:36
Speaker
There's got to be so much soil and material just dumped out by that river because of where it's at. You know, all the sand and everything that just moves easily with the river, man. Yeah. Yeah. It's very flat and those rivers constantly jump course anytime they flood, especially for eighties and.
00:02:56
Speaker
some of these major sites like Lagash, like Ur, which are now pretty far inland back in antiquity when they were at their heights where Ur had docks on one side, had an arbor. So yeah, they were right there on the river right next to the Persian Gulf and now they're deep inland.
00:03:15
Speaker
Wow, that's crazy. And I've been on the Persian Gulf in a nuclear aircraft carrier. That's the only time. It's crazy, the intersection of things here. Yeah. All right. Well, we're not done talking about drones because they're definitely going to be part of this next conversation. But we're going to talk about an article that was actually sent to us by the APN's co-founder,
Future of Technology in Archaeology
00:03:37
Speaker
Tristan Boyle. He dropped it in our Slack channel here. And it's from Heritage Daily. I know, right?
00:03:43
Speaker
It's from Heritage Daily. We'll have the link in the show notes, but it's called Why Archaeology Will Be the Next Harbor for Technology. It was written on October 12, 2021 by Terry Maddenholm. I don't know if I think I'm saying that right, Terry Maddenholm.
00:03:58
Speaker
And she is a project partner for a company called Drone Archaeology, and they focus on identifying threatened archaeological sites using non-invasive technologies such as lidar, satellite imagery, and drones, and building 3D models of endangered heritage. And I will mention, we tried to get Terry on this, but I couldn't seem to get ahold of her through LinkedIn or through the Drone Archaeology website. So we'll keep trying, because I'd like to talk to the people that work for this company, because according to their website,
00:04:24
Speaker
Man, they seem to have a really robust program across several continents and doing some really cool things according to, like I said, the website, but I can't seem to get ahold of them. So that's what we're going to talk about. Yeah, I was pretty excited looking at their website because one of their missions is education. So they have a number of different courses and lectures available for archaeologists.
00:04:46
Speaker
for a fee, they are a company. That's fine. I mean, if they're providing a good service, by all means, we should be able to pay for it in order to gain access to that knowledge. We don't all have to reinvent the wheel. Yeah. So we're going to spend our time talking about some of the things that Terry mentions in this article, what we liked about it, what we didn't like about it, where we agree or disagree. And I'm sure this will be a good jumping off point for some other stuff that we are going to
00:05:12
Speaker
discussed. So the first thing that popped out at me in this article that I put in our notes is, and this is a quote from the article, is, archaeologists are equipped with the newest technological tools that allow, and she goes on, but she mentions laser scanners, satellite imagery, dot, dot, dot. And
00:05:30
Speaker
I'm just like, really?
Is Archaeology Pioneering Technology?
00:05:33
Speaker
We spend our entire podcast talking about how archaeologists are behind the times in most cases. There's definitely forward-thinking archaeologists and companies out there that are trying to do better, not just established technologies. It's odd to say that drones are an established technology now, but they really are. And even 3D printing and scanning really is kind of an established technology now that you can buy a rudimentary 3D printer for like $200.
00:06:00
Speaker
Those are now established things that more and more companies are starting to add to their routine versus their novelty lab items that they might use once or twice. When it gets added to the routine, that's when I would call it a big thing. Yeah. I thought that satellite imagery was a bit of an odd one to put in there.
00:06:17
Speaker
And that I know archaeologists have been using Landsat 5 since the 70s. The tools to manipulate that satellite imagery have gotten better and faster and more accessible over the years. The accessibility of that imagery has gotten better along the way, but satellite imagery writ large is certainly nothing new in the field. I'm sure we've all used and experienced it in various ways.
00:06:42
Speaker
It's been getting better. And ever since Google Earth came out and we could start seeing detailed photographs of our site areas, our houses, our neighbors, all that stuff, it's much, much easier to work with and interact with. And we can use it as a test. I've seen a lot of different Google Earth base maps for things. And that is satellite imagery.
00:07:09
Speaker
But I guess it's because of that ubiquity that I don't know that it had to be called out specifically. Yeah, and you got to watch out for satellite imagery too, of course, right? Because if you're looking for the current state of affairs in a satellite image, obviously you're not going to necessarily get that depending on what you're actually working on. If you're working in some place that's being developed, then there's a little chance that the
00:07:30
Speaker
imagery you're going to get access to is actually current. Even the RV park we're in outside of Austin, Texas right now is not on the satellite images. They just opened in July, which means they were probably developing this, I would assume, through the early part of this year. But to be honest, I don't know when they started developing this, but it's a forest next to the highway if you look at the satellite. And now it's 100 RV spots that are all paved and manicured.
00:07:56
Speaker
That's in the imagery. I had something just now today on this project that I'm working on. I was looking at the map and we are following along where land surveyors, they're surveying in the course of a proposed hiking trail along the Hudson River.
00:08:16
Speaker
And so fortunately for us, we just go to the points that they've surveyed every 50 feet. And that's where we can drop our STPs, which is really easy. We don't even have to work with maps. But I was looking at the map that the principal sent me and looking at the course and following along what we did yesterday. And I'm like, it goes on the map. It goes to one side of a white dot. And I know what that white dot is. It's a structure. But when we were there, we were on the other side of the white dot. We were the other side of that structure.
00:08:45
Speaker
It's just a shed right at the edge of the road. It's nothing big. I don't know. Is that because the map was misaligned? Is that because the surveyors put the points in the wrong place? I hope not, but I'm not entirely sure what went wrong with that.
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, you never can tell really. You just got to be careful with what you're looking at. One nice thing that Google Earth did, and Google Earth seems relatively unsupported now, the independent application. I think it's all basically rolled into Google Maps. But I just don't know well enough if this is a thing you can easily find anymore. But again, one of the things Google Earth did really well was the historical imagery and telling you the year that the imagery you're looking at was actually collected and created. So that's pretty handy.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's been something I use a lot just idly because I'm not doing any research right now, but with Yemen, there's been so much construction in parts where I've worked that I can use it and I can see the expansion of towns. I can see the encroachment of fields upon sites. The land gets ripped up and changed. I see a couple historic forts that are no longer in existence.
00:09:56
Speaker
And you can see that because you can just use that little slider at the top of Google Earth and say, this year, last year, two years ago, back as far as they have imagery for that particular location. I used to like doing that for open pit mines in Nevada because the pit change is so dramatically. Oh, of course. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Just looking back through the imagery and watching a mountain grow where
00:10:20
Speaker
Well, there isn't one now. All right. Well, let's take a short break and come back and continue talking about this article. In the meantime, go check it out. It's in the show notes, arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash 166, or just take a look at whatever app you're using right now to listen to this podcast. Unless you're driving, don't do that and click on the article and it should take you straight there. Back in a minute.
00:10:44
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:12:07
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 166. We're talking about an article from Heritage Daily written in October 2021. Check it out in the show notes. And I'm just kind of pulling out quotes here because let me just tell you, the article talks about a whole bunch of different technologies that the author says is transforming the field of archaeology. That is indisputable. All these things are actually transforming the field of archaeology in their own independent way.
00:12:34
Speaker
But she does it in a way that makes it seem like we're pioneering these things. And maybe we're pioneering the use of lidar for archaeological research, sure. But we certainly didn't pioneer the use of lidar for anything, right? So in satellite imagery and AI and all this other stuff, archaeology, I feel like the only thing we pioneered is camping in the wilderness, drinking heavily, and working the next day without any problem. That's really where it ends.
00:13:05
Speaker
I think as far as being a pioneering sort of resource and saying that archaeology is almost the basis for these things and the place where these things are being allowed to be fruitful and develop more
00:13:22
Speaker
seems to be a little bit starry-eyed to me and not really following along with truth. I don't know. What do you think about that, Paul? Yeah, I mean, the article is light on details. That's not its purpose. It's not trying to tell you. It's not trying to be an exhaustive list of things. It's a bit of a cheerleading for tech and archaeology, and that way it's a lot like this year podcast, you know? That's true.
00:13:44
Speaker
It could well have been me just idly chatting about technology and archaeology off the cuff, off the top of my head. I wanted more.
00:14:00
Speaker
I think I say that about every article we read. But yeah, I agree with you. It did maybe give a bit of an aspirational sense of how technology is used in archaeology rather than make a forceful argument for how it can be used and
Robotics and AI in Archaeology
00:14:19
Speaker
what directions it can go. It was kind of like, hey, here's cool things. There might be other cool things coming down the road.
00:14:26
Speaker
which is all true. It can't falter for that, but there wasn't enough meat really.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. So that leads right into one of the other quotes I pulled out, which is actually right near the beginning of the article where she says that, soon robotics and AI will become an essential part of the field too. That much I don't dispute. Why not? Transforming archaeology into a discipline of the future. I feel like by the time robotics and AI become an essential part of the field and using that word routine again, by the time they become routine,
00:15:01
Speaker
that archaeology will be just catching up with everyone else, not a discipline of the future. That seems, again, a little bit starry-eyed to me because, sure, we're already using robotics and AI in a way, right? You're talking about using something like drone deploy over in Iraq. That's literally robotics and AI doing the work for you. You basically push a button after you program it, and the robot does all the work for you.
00:15:23
Speaker
And then you upload all those images and some other computer that I don't have to configure is going to stitch them all together and hopefully give me a good map at the end. Exactly. Exactly. So we are, we are already doing that. And I guess in the context of maybe some other businesses or industries, I should say, maybe we're a little bit part of the future, but man, I really feel like surveyors and a lot of other people have been doing a lot of this stuff.
00:15:49
Speaker
you know, well before the field of archaeology. I don't want to keep harping on that, like the starry-eyed nature of the article, because it is like a little bit of that throughout. That's the thrust of the whole thing, given the title. But, you know, I just want to talk about these things independently, see where they're at today.
00:16:04
Speaker
going to put a little plug in here for something I found out about last week, a book. I'm plugging it because it's from the Santa Fe Institute, a few people I follow on Twitter. It's called Agent-Based Modeling for Archaeology. They have a freely downloadable PDF of it.
00:16:19
Speaker
So I haven't had the chance to read it yet. Hopefully, I'll be digging into it some on the really, really long flight from New York to Basra. Well, two flights actually and a really, really long layover. But that maybe gets kind of unpacked for me a little bit about what we might mean by using AI in archaeology. So I'll definitely put a link to that in the show notes too.
00:16:46
Speaker
Okay, yeah, sounds good. Yeah, let's talk about a few more things here. She says that we may expect in the coming years, a launch of a satellite specially designed for archaeological use. And again, I thought that was a cool thing to say, but man, that is pure speculation on her part. And I'm wondering,
00:17:05
Speaker
Who would fund that? It's always a question of who's going to pay for that. Paul, if you could launch a satellite specifically for archaeological use, what kind of attributes would that have?
Satellite for Archaeology: Feasibility and Funding
00:17:16
Speaker
And then more importantly, how would you control tasking? Who gets to use it? But let's say, what would you want it to do if we had our own satellite for archaeological use?
00:17:26
Speaker
Probably the biggest thing I would want to do would be able to monitor sites remotely and automate it by itself. We could probably do that with existing satellite imagery and the existing tool sets, but that would probably be the highest priority for me, especially because so many of the parts of the world I've worked are really subject to bad looting.
00:17:50
Speaker
not just be looting. It can also be, like I said before, encroachment of cities and farmers' fields, construction activities like roads and so on, basically to fill in some of the gaps to maybe predict areas of high sensitivity before we actually have to send people on the ground to go look at that. That to me would be something specifically archaeological
00:18:09
Speaker
that we could do it. It wouldn't be groundbreakingly new in terms of the technologies applied, but it would be if there was a purpose-built satellite system for doing that, that would be useful, I could see.
00:18:22
Speaker
Do you have any ideas? Because one of the things that we get at the same time criticized for and lionized for as archaeologists is that we don't really invent our own stuff. And radiocarbon is often held up as the only thing that was ever really invented by and for archaeologists. And I don't even know how much the by was by archaeologists.
00:18:44
Speaker
Everything I can think of, I struggle to come up with something new that wouldn't be already in use by agriculture, for example, forestry, things that are much more lucrative industries, and then we could piggyback off of their technologies.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah. And you're totally right. I mean, there's so many things that, that we just use, which I, that's one of the things I do like about archeology though, is we are a multifaceted discipline that does use a number of other things in order to answer a single question, right? Like what, why and how, you know, how, how'd they get here? What were they doing? And you know, how'd they do it? So that's not a single question. It kind of is. It's your thesis for the whole site, but
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah, and again, that's what I really like about it. But I think some things I would like to go back to the satellite question is, obviously, the highest resolution you could possibly get, because I'd love to be able to do some pattern shape recognition and analysis based off of satellite imagery and do some preliminary survey type of thing with that, using some algorithms and machine learning type stuff to figure out what's there before you even go out there. That would be super cool.
00:19:49
Speaker
But then the other types of imagery that you could probably do off of a satellite as well, not just visual imagery, but some sort of multi-spectral imagery or something that would help us see other things. You can't do LiDAR off a satellite. I don't think that that wouldn't work, but it needs too much power. But there's got to be other stuff. There's other types of satellite imagery that would definitely benefit archaeology, maybe some that don't even exist yet.
00:20:14
Speaker
Right. But benefit of archeology is different than something being purposely built for archeology. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we're splitting hairs here, but that did stick out to me as well, reading. I was like, really? Something for archeologists? I have troubles believing that.
00:20:33
Speaker
Yeah, indeed, indeed. I mean, unless it's a new microbrew, I can't imagine anything for archaeologists. Trust me, there have been plenty of those made just for archaeologists, plenty of archaeology brewers out there.
00:20:48
Speaker
I guess when I was thinking of the satellite, I wasn't even thinking of something made with new technologies invented for archaeology. I was just thinking of a satellite, literally a satellite put together with existing technologies, but tasked only for archaeology. That's what I was thinking. That's basically what I was arguing with the monitoring satellite. New technologies require somebody smarter than I am and more inventive than I am, more able to think outside the box.
00:21:16
Speaker
integrate different kinds of scientific techniques that I'm capable of. But existing ones, I can think of them, but I also can't imagine where, like you said, the money would be the pole, the real interest. That's why I went to monitoring.
00:21:35
Speaker
What we saw with ISIS in Syria in particular is that there is worldwide interest in what happens to archaeological sites when they get damaged or destroyed. But is that enough to translate into real action or is it yet another one-third scale model of the arch at Palmyra?
00:22:01
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, and when I try to think of new stuff as well, I mean, invention is driven by need, right? And archaeologists have a pretty common need, aside from the typical archaeological questions that we try to answer, we have a pretty common need of collecting and organizing large amounts of data, making sure everything is
00:22:23
Speaker
accessible in multiple formats, like you said, you know, the destruction of certain things. I mean, even Notre Dame as well, when that burned down, if we didn't have so many scans of that, I mean, they were able to basically, I saw a 3D model that was put together of Notre Dame from Instagram images because so many people have stood in front of it and taken pictures of it. They were able to get enough photos to basically reconstruct it. And it's been scanned so many times on the inside and out for video games and other things that
00:22:52
Speaker
if they want to build that thing exactly as it was before it burned down, it will be absolutely no problem. We know every square inch of that thing, almost literally every square inch. And so having that kind of data
00:23:04
Speaker
is something that we need. But really, our needs come down to who's going to pay for it and who's going to do it. Because I feel like the technologies already exist to do a lot of things we want to do. We just don't have the funds or time or research case in some instances to actually get it done. Like virtually reconstructing, let's say, the entire planet at different time periods. That would be super cool. We're already gathering the data to do that in most cases.
00:23:30
Speaker
It would be fun to put something like it together, but who could possibly do that? You know who could possibly do that? Lithodomos we are maybe I don't know so yeah Anyway, let's take our final break and wrap this article up on the other side And I want to talk about our tiny robot army that we're gonna display We'll talk about that in just a minute back in a second
00:23:51
Speaker
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00:24:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the final segment of episode 166 of the Architect Podcast. And we're talking about this article in Heritage Daily, linked in the show notes. One of the last quotes I wrote down here that Terry mentions in the article is, we can therefore envision that in the near future, archaeologists will deploy legions of tiny bots that will perform archaeological operations while documenting each step of the process.
Sci-Fi Inspired Tiny Robots in Archaeology
00:24:36
Speaker
They would be used to collect samples, for example, DNA testing.
00:24:39
Speaker
without disturbing the integrity of the site. And I got to tell you that is really, really crazy to me. Awesome. Don't get me wrong. I can think of tiny many cases where I've seen an episode of Star Trek that mentioned something about nanobots and I'm like, wow, we could really use that to do some stuff.
00:24:55
Speaker
Because if you can imagine actual nanobots, not just tiny robots doing things, because we actually talked about that snake-like tube robot thing that can move through sites and have a camera. So that's one thing. But I'm thinking nanobots that can actually go through the soil, not disturb the soil necessarily, but go through the soil like tiny little sugar ants. And then everything they touch gets mapped, and you get this full profile under the ground.
00:25:21
Speaker
And then they come back out, go back into their tube. Hopefully they don't, you know, take over the planet and do it or, you know, get absorbed into your body, whatever the case may be. But just do that sort of thing. I could envision that. But seriously, where is that technology and when is that technology? Yeah. I mean, we certainly don't have anything small enough like that, autonomous enough like that. And that could map details like that. But but I thought that was kind of interesting because, you know, I've joked with you about your your your tricorder that you pull out and you
00:25:48
Speaker
get a snapshot of what's under the ground right there and you know, you know, how many levels and how deep and where's the architecture and where the fire pits and blah, blah, blah. That that would actually be one way about actually making that happen. You know, so not through a magic scanner, but through little physical devices that go and do the digging with as minimal disturbance as possible and do the recording as accurately and as comprehensively as possible and then return with all that information and you deploy
00:26:15
Speaker
I don't know, hundreds of thousands across the site, let them do that and then collect and now you've got a snapshot. So that might work. But again, when would anything like that be coming down the pike? I can't imagine it's anywhere within the next 20 years. And I mean, yes, lack of imagination is not a good basis for an argument, but I really can't imagine it coming around too soon.
00:26:40
Speaker
And are you saying 20 years before something like that is invented or 20 years before archaeologists would get their hands on it? Because it's got to be at least 10 years after it's invented that we'd be able to afford it. I was thinking 20 years until it's invented. And I don't think that the gap is necessarily that long. I mean, how long did it take for drones, since we mention them all the time, drink, to go from being something that
00:27:02
Speaker
only the military had to something that was a really cool toy to something that is pretty commonly used by many, many different projects. Probably about 15 years? Yeah, I suppose so. It's a really interesting question. What
00:27:23
Speaker
Drones fascinating because I grew up with RC airplanes and not RC helicopters, but I definitely seen them. We never had any RC helicopters, but my dad was an RC modeler and my grandfather was. I just grew up from the time I was an infant to being around RC airplanes. My dad still flies and builds RC airplanes. I've been around that for a long time.
00:27:47
Speaker
It's like when somebody first threw a camera on something and made it so pretty much anybody could fly it because it had four rotors and it maintained stability, all of a sudden they're called drones. Why aren't RC airplanes called drones? When did that technology really start and then modify itself and evolve into the thing you can buy in the gas station today and take pictures of your neighbor with over the fence? Because even the small ones that you can buy for $25 have a camera inside them in most cases.
00:28:16
Speaker
I feel like it's that camera technology and the transmission of that camera data back to a smartphone, so also smartphone technology that actually brought this into play for more than just your hobbyist that wants to fly something around.
00:28:31
Speaker
So along those lines, yeah, you're right. When they became small enough and more affordable for archaeologists to use, it was still a few years before they did it because archaeologists aren't really, you know, again, you need somebody that's not only tech forward in their thinking, but also
00:28:48
Speaker
not scared to learn how to fly something, which is a completely different skill than most people even think they have. It's not that hard, but it's also one of those things that people are just afraid of. Even if they are tech forward, they're going to back away from that because they're afraid of flying or afraid of that RC aspect of it. So I don't know. I didn't answer your question. I just asked 10 more, but there you go.
00:29:09
Speaker
I think that the camera has a lot to do with it, actually. The camera, and like you said, the stability of having the quadrotor, which is what we generally think of when we think of drones, though from the FAA's perspective, you can have a fixed-wing drone.
00:29:24
Speaker
Yeah. Well, they fall under the same regulations. You have to fly them differently, but you're under the exact same regulations and under the exact same permit to do so. But that camera bit, I think is really what made the difference. Yeah, I think you're right. Because all our imagery of drones from the Iraq war or everything, it's always somebody sitting in a room, hundreds or a thousand miles away,
00:29:49
Speaker
piloting the thing remotely and you see the grainy video of people on the ground being shot at. I think that expectation of how you interact with the machine through that camera, that vision of the camera that's carrying onboard itself is really a tipped
00:30:10
Speaker
people's perception of these things over from being the RC airplanes like what you and I know from our youths to these drones that are everywhere. And they suddenly became very, very useful for archaeologists. But back to my other point, though, I don't think that
00:30:26
Speaker
I think that the adoption of so many technologies is happening quicker and quicker. I think that the passing from cutting edge to standard toolkit for archaeologists is going that same transformation. Things are moving along faster and faster at more pace.
00:30:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think they are. I did want to make a little comment, though, because the the example with the legions of tiny robots was collecting samples for DNA testing, for example, which I thought, hmm, that's you're you're sending them down specifically at burials or what? Yeah. But
00:31:03
Speaker
The DNA testing, even though it only really gets this kind of passing mention in this article, is one of those areas that the technology and archaeology, from medical sciences, from biological sciences, from chemical sciences, from physics,
00:31:20
Speaker
These things have been coming back into archaeology in some interesting ways. I've mentioned before that I'm on the board of the New York Society of the AIA, and we had a lecture last week by Dr. Felix Stockhamer from the Max Planck Institute talking about different, what was the term? It was bioarchaeological.
00:31:46
Speaker
techniques being applied to Mycenaean and Minoan sites. And so he was talking, it was just a broad overview, but with details on each of them. So it was a lot to chew on. We recorded it, but it's a lot of unpublished work. So we're not going to be able to put it up on a YouTube channel until
00:32:04
Speaker
sometime in 2022 when it does get published. But I got a lot of great feedback from people afterwards about it because they were so excited by the ways that he was illustrating. So just as a couple examples, he was talking about lipid analyses from dental tartar to find out about what people were eating. That's definitely something that
00:32:26
Speaker
you wouldn't have been able to do probably 10 years ago, but they were doing that. So they were finding all sorts of things about the kinds of foods that distinct populations were eating because they have a lot of burials. They also did DNA. This is where I was tying it back to that DNA comment. They also did DNA analysis of a bunch of different, showing different marital patterns.
00:32:48
Speaker
because they could trace out the cladograms of relatedness of people through their DNA and say that this society seems to have had a high preference for cousin marriage, for first cousin marriage. And in the Q&A at the end, a classicist that I know came on all excited. He's like,
00:33:06
Speaker
That might explain the housing on these sites that we're at because they look like palaces in terms of the size that these buildings are, but they're not divided up in the same way the palaces are. It's like an agglomeration of distinct houses, like nuclear family houses. These might be kinship groups related to this first cousin marriage and their descendants said,
00:33:32
Speaker
So that went from archaeology excavating the burials through the scientists doing the DNA analysis back into the archaeology, and then that fed back into another archaeological question, possibly an answer to an existing archaeological question. So that was really cool to see. And that's the kind of stuff that I think I wish I had more
00:33:57
Speaker
ability to discuss because you and I talk a lot about satellite imagery and drones because we're both at some level aerospace geeks and like looking at the world top down.
Integrating Scientific Techniques from Other Fields
00:34:09
Speaker
But there are all sorts of great questions that can be asked by people that are coming at it from other hard science techniques. But of course, it's like we've said a million times, it's getting
00:34:21
Speaker
that biologist, that chemist talking to that archaeologist and speaking enough of the same language that they can come up with new techniques, new questions to ask and possibly like in this case, some new answers. Yeah. And that is one of the great things about an article like this that people may be exposed to Heritage Daily. This may have been shared because it has archaeology that maybe you've got a news alert or something like that. And an article like this that mentions, you know, 10 different things
00:34:50
Speaker
Maybe you knew about the top three or four that a bunch of people know about like drones and 3D printing and things like that. But maybe there were some things in here that you hadn't even considered. And now you can think about how those technologies that are new to you can be applied to your site. So along the same lines of what you're talking about,
00:35:09
Speaker
I mean, keeping an open mind in the types of things you read, listen to, and search for, and go to lectures on, and stuff like that will just help you become, I think, a better, I don't know, a better scientist, really, like any scientific profession, just broadening your horizons on what's possible and thinking, well, what can that do for me in archaeology? Can I do anything with that? Aside from just saying, I have a question I can't answer, I don't know how to answer it, what field could do that?
00:35:37
Speaker
I find it's easier to look at different and newer fields and say, how can I apply that to what I'm doing now? Because it's hard to imagine things that you don't know exist, but it's easy to take something you know exists and say, how can I apply that to what I'm doing? So I don't know. When we were
00:35:52
Speaker
After having the nanobot discussion, I typed in nanorobotics into Google. I didn't obviously read the whole thing because we're podcasting right now, but I'll maybe link to this. I might not because just Google nanorobotics is a whole bunch of things that come out, but there's just one thing, one brief thing I saw in this Science Daily article talking about metallic
00:36:13
Speaker
nanotechnology. It's an area that allows microscopic particles of metals such as gold and silver to be manipulated with heat and light. They're really talking about this from a medical standpoint, so moving these metallic particles around. They're not robots, right? You're using
00:36:30
Speaker
I don't know what they look like if they're just several atoms of gold or something like that. It is nano, so it's 0.1 millimeters or something like that. I can't remember what the actual nano is.
00:36:46
Speaker
It's really small particles of stuff being manipulated by an outside force. That's super cool. That's a way that I hadn't even thought about doing what I was mentioning with releasing something into the soil that you can then extract back out. But can you control it and then can you get feedback on position and location of that thing? That's basically how stuff like
00:37:07
Speaker
like GPR works, right, or resistivity. It's basically sending out a signal and recording what comes back based on what it hit as an obstruction. Well, you could do the same thing with particles of something or little tiny robots and just send them out. If you can record their positions or they can report back their positions when they get back and what they encountered, you can map what's under the surface.
00:37:30
Speaker
They just can't be too small because, you know, if you find pottery, they can't go through the pottery. They have to stop at the pottery wall so it can map the pottery really, really small. They could go through the pottery.
00:37:41
Speaker
That's what I'm talking about. You have to figure out what the right size is, right? If you've got a clay soil with pottery in it, you might be screwed because the pottery is going to be way more porous than that clay soil. What kind of robot would you even throw into there that could not go through the pottery? How does it know to stop at the pottery and not just think, yay, it's a much more easy surface to get through than this clay?
00:38:06
Speaker
a new t-shirt of that, a little archaeological nanobot going, yay. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, check out the show notes. We've got a few things in there, including this article. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it and see what you guys think about it. And you know what?
00:38:27
Speaker
What have you seen on TV, radio, news, podcasts, magazines, Google searches that you thought, this is a cool thing. How could I use this for technology? And if you've come up with something, I'd like to hear about it. And if you haven't come up with something, let us know. Maybe Paul and I can come up with a reason, a way to do it. That's one.
00:38:45
Speaker
man, that would be a fun episode, wouldn't it? Where we just come up with, we just Google these like wacky technologies, like this metallic nano, nano robotics and say, okay, how would I use that for archeology? Let's just force it into this archeology bucket and see what we could do with it. That'd be super fun. So, all right. Any other thoughts on this, Paul? Uh, probably, but at the moment I think I'm tapped out.
00:39:10
Speaker
All right. Sounds good. Well, I hope to next time it's just going to be me because Paul is going to be in Iraq. And we had an interview scheduled actually for this one that failed for technological reasons. So we're doing this instead. So we'll probably have a pretty good GIS and CRM discussion on the next episode. And well, I'm not going to put too many details out because if we don't do it, we don't do it. So we'll find out.
00:39:36
Speaker
Stay tuned for that. I think it's going to be OK. I think we're going to get to do that one. And Paul, we'll be looking forward to in a few episodes from now when you get back and talk about Iraq and how your experience was over there. Yeah, looking forward to it. All right. Thanks, everybody. And we'll see you next time. Take care. Bye.
00:39:57
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugol.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.
00:40:22
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.
00:40:49
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.