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Mobile GIS Solutions - Ep 170
276 Plays3 years ago
Over the summer Paul had experience with a couple different tablet-based GIS solutions. They're some of the most popular on the market. What were his impressions of those and are the suitable for the project he's working with in Iraq? We discuss those and more on today's episode.
Links
- 3D reconstruction of the E-dub-lal-mah at Ur
- 3D reconstruction and printable model of the Great Ziggurat of Ur
- Touch GIS
- ArcGIS Field Maps
- QGIS
- QuickMapServices
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
ArchPodNet
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- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
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- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
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.
Hosts Introduction and Topic Overview
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, Episode 170. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss some of the tools we use with a focus on mobile GIS and surveying strategies. Let's get to it.
00:00:34
Speaker
All
Reflections on Productivity Between Holidays
00:00:35
Speaker
right. Welcome to the podcast, everybody. Paul, how's it going? It's going pretty good. Right now we're recording on December 30th. So it's in that kind of liminal period between Christmas for those who celebrate like I do and they're all celebrating like I do is give my family some gifts and then, you know, drink some eggnog and New Year's, right? Where nobody really knows what's going on. It's hard to make appointments. So you work on other things. I've been working a lot of other things because I can do that without having to rely on other people.
00:01:02
Speaker
How's your end of 2021 going? I'll tell you, this is the best week. And it's actually, you know, a lot of people like to have Christmas or New Year's or something like on a weekday. So you get like more days off. But I'll tell you what, I like having the bookended weekend personally, because most of the people I would have to work with are off this week anyway. So even if you don't take the week off, there's just like not that much to do. And it's a, it's like a built in chill week for the entire year. And it's just,
00:01:32
Speaker
I don't know. It's nice. And I'm transitioning at my workplace a little bit. So don't have a lot to do with that this
Travel Plans and Weather Considerations
00:01:38
Speaker
week. That'll kick off in the next few weeks. It'll change a bit. But yeah, it's been nice. So we're here in Charlotte, North Carolina still. And shortly after the new year, day or two after, we are headed back to the West Coast. So that should be interesting. Yeah. Hey, you're heading back to Reno.
00:01:57
Speaker
Well, no, we're heading to Arizona for an event. We're going to. That's right. Okay. I was going to say, Reno got hit by that snowstorm, didn't it?
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah. We're kind of staying away from the north in our RV, anywhere in the north. Like when we head back, we're heading back as far south as we can, probably taking 10 across. We're going to try 40 for a little bit, but 40 is getting into some stuff possibly. So we don't mess with snow tires and chains and stuff like that in a 26,000 pound house. Yeah. That was one heck of a storm. Yeah. No, I was a little worried when he said, you're going back west. How's that thing off road?
00:02:30
Speaker
I don't even want to know. So anyway. All right. Well today, this is a topic, Paul, that you came up with and basically set us up for us while let you get on with what we're going to talk about here.
Software Compatibility and Usability
00:02:44
Speaker
All right. And before we even talk about the topic that queued up, I've got already two asides. One, I was thinking about
00:02:51
Speaker
What I was talking about last episode about R and how it doesn't really work for me, for a long, long time, I've said, oh, it's not really the way my brain works. Not just R, but that's my metric, not really metric, but my guiding principle for whether I like particular software or not. It's like, it works with the way my brain works or it doesn't work the way my brain works. And I've always, I've used that for probably a couple decades now.
00:03:17
Speaker
And it's always felt a little lacking. And I didn't have a good analogy. And the other day, actually, I realized a much better analogy for it. It's like this. I'm extremely right handed. I write with my right hand. I draw with my right hand. I gesture with my right hand. My left hand is practically useless, like anybody who's ever heard me play guitar can attest. Nice. Give me a pair of right handed scissors. I'm fine. Give me a pair of left handed scissors.
00:03:43
Speaker
And the options are try to use it with my right hand and it won't work or try to use it with my left hand and it works but not well. And so that's how I feel with a lot of different kinds of software. Some of the stuff just naturally fits with me and some of it I have to work against my own instincts in order to make it work. And that's when I kind of throw up my hands and say, no, I don't want to do this.
00:04:04
Speaker
Well, that is a good analogy because that's how a lot of things go in life, right? Sometimes some things you just get and that's generally what people gravitate to and other things. It's a real, real struggle just to understand, you know, what's going on. Honestly, I feel like, well, and then sometimes the light bulb goes off, right? Like sometimes I look at Trello that way. We use Trello to organize our shows and stuff. And I was first introduced to Trello by a colleague I was working with and he was a coder and he was really into Trello.
00:04:34
Speaker
And I just couldn't get into it for like a year. I almost resisted even going there and using it. And then all of a sudden I had like a light bulb go off and I just understood how I could use Trello, how I could see it being used. And it's a relatively simple thing. I just, I just couldn't wrap my head around a use case for it for me and for how I wanted to do things. And now I use it for almost every single thing that I do. So I totally get what you're saying.
Understanding and Utilizing Trello
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, and that light bulb moment is also a lot of fun when you do have something that you didn't get or you struggled with and then all of a sudden something clicks. You learn some trick, you change your perspective and all of a sudden, hey, this actually, I get why somebody else likes it. And maybe I'll hit that point at some point with R. I wouldn't be surprised if I do because I want to like it.
00:05:19
Speaker
But for now, I think that that left-handed scissors is the best explanation because there's so many people for whom it's really good software. It's a really good programming language and it does exactly what they need in the same way that for a lot of people out there, a tenth to a third of the population, those left-handed scissors are a godsend. Unfortunately, I'm just not one of them. I mean, I'm left-handed. I would love to just see a pair of left-handed scissors. I don't think I've ever used one. They're hard to find. Yeah.
00:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, which is a whole another conversation that might get into things like open access and accessibility and so on. But we're not going to go down that road yet. Yeah, we might touch on it because I seem like we always touch on it a little bit. The other side that I had is that I was telling you about the 3D models I made at Ur when we were there with the drone over
Sharing 3D Models and the Importance of Visibility
00:06:08
Speaker
flights.
00:06:08
Speaker
And I've finally gotten all the permissions and have posted a 3D model, beautifully rendered of the Edublama structure at Ur and also the Ziggurat of Ur, both on Sketchfab. And the Ziggurat, I also, because that's the kind of geek I am, I decided to turn into a 3D printable model. So that's on Thingiverse as well. So I'm going to put links to those so that our listeners, if they want to go check these out, can.
00:06:36
Speaker
I had these just waiting and because there are many different stakeholders involved, I didn't want to just post it up there. I wanted to make sure that I had the proper permissions and I was going to be able to do this without upsetting anybody. And I finally got the green light and it was all queued up and ready to go. And so that was just a couple of hours ago and I'm still riding the high of that. Nice, nice. That's really awesome. And it highlights a
00:07:02
Speaker
a thing that we should all be aware of when we're doing work in archaeology, which is share it, show people. I mean, obviously, wait and suppress that urge to do it right away like you did, which was good. Wait until you get the proper permissions like you did, but share your work. And a lot of times,
00:07:19
Speaker
man, we either don't get the opportunity or we don't want to go down the road because it's too hard and it's, you know, you got to find out from this person and that person, can I do this? But it's so worth it because that's why we do this. So we can, you know, tell stories and help other people learn from those.
00:07:37
Speaker
I mean, with the big caveat that you have to make sure that stakeholders, and particularly for everybody working in the US, a big stakeholder community that has to be considered that often isn't our descendant communities, I don't have that issue with Iraq, even though I'm sure everybody there is in some way or another descendant community.
00:07:54
Speaker
But there, my biggest worry was running afoul of the Antiquities Authority, not because they're hard to deal with, but because they might have expectations as to what I can and cannot make public. Not for religious reasons, but for jurisdictional reasons.
00:08:11
Speaker
for permitting reasons. I wanted to make sure that I was clean with that before I did it, but I'm a huge fan of sharing. Actually, that gets us. That's a nice segue to what I actually wanted to talk about today.
Survey Planning with Mobile GIS
00:08:22
Speaker
The project that I worked on in the fall, I worked on a number of CRM projects, but I also worked on this project in Iraq, the Lagash Archaeological Project from the University of Pennsylvania.
00:08:34
Speaker
They are currently writing an NSF grant for the spring and fall seasons next year. I've been put in charge of coming up with a plan for a full coverage survey of the site. It's a very large site, over 450 hectares. One of the big reasons why I wanted to get into CRM is I have a lot of respect for it
00:08:58
Speaker
because of the scheduling, the deadlines, the fact that you have to take into account legal restrictions, and again, descendant communities, other stakeholders, that there are things that cannot be made public. They may be under an NDA or they may be culturally sensitive in certain ways. There are lots of different restrictions on CRM that
00:09:23
Speaker
we don't really have an academic archaeology that make CRM in some ways much more rigorous. My hope is to be able to start getting my feet wet with CRM and bring some of the best ideas across into academic archaeology. I've been thinking a lot about how I'm going to do this survey in Lagash next spring.
00:09:47
Speaker
based off of some of the things that I've learned in just my few months as a CRM archaeologist. And one of the main components is going to be then mobile GIS, because I do everything with tech. You know, I think in tech, back to how my brain works. And mobile GIS is a topic that we've had on this podcast a few times, and we each have experiences with. So I'm going to just get the ball rolling here with this now that we've kind of set the place, what, laid the table.
00:10:16
Speaker
with a mention of TouchGIS.
Choosing Tools for Fieldwork: TouchGIS vs. Trimble
00:10:18
Speaker
Now, you reviewed TouchGIS as your app of the day back in episode 131 in June 2020, and we've mentioned it a couple of times subsequently. For the listeners, can you describe for us how DigTech, how you use TouchGIS in the field?
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah. And I'll start by saying the reason we were looking for a solution is because I don't use trembles. The biggest reason around not using a tremble or some other, you know, comparative sub-eater device, although there's very few out there. It's really tremble is like the one in the, it's the big name in the game there. And the reason we don't do that is because A,
00:10:55
Speaker
We, to be honest, do not do a lot of field work. So I don't need to go spend even a few thousand dollars on a multi-year old, you know, Trimble, because we can afford a new one. But I don't need to spend thousands of dollars on an older one. I've rented them before, which is an option. It ends up being about 70, $80 a day. And when you need it for, you know, two months, that adds up because they don't care about weekends. You know, you're, you're renting it every day that you have it.
00:11:21
Speaker
That gets expensive too. There's got to be a different solution. I started looking around. We typically use iPads or iPhones in the field. I was looking for an iOS solution and I landed on TouchGIS.
00:11:38
Speaker
The big problem is usually not just data collection, but data extraction. That's, that's kind of a huge one too. Right. And then, and then in the middle of that is, does it support the datums that you need? You know, so can we, can we use the right datum? Can we enter information in a way that we need to, and can we get it out as shape files that we can do, you know, real stuff with and, and send off to other people that are used to seeing shape files as re compatible shape files. And that's how touch GIS work for us. So.
00:12:07
Speaker
We usually have it on an iPad Mini, although I have used it on my phone before for stuff I didn't need submeter for. And I'm only saying that because we also pair that iPad Mini with EOS Aero 100 that we got from Anatom Geomobile Solutions.
00:12:23
Speaker
that gives us sub meter on the touch GIS interface in
Recording Survey Data with TouchGIS
00:12:27
Speaker
the field. And I mean, the nice thing about it is we had the, like for this last project that we've been doing the last couple of years, we had the base maps out there that show us exactly where we need to be serving. And Rachel, my wife was
00:12:41
Speaker
basically the crew chief out there. And she would, you know, she had a layer where she would mark out exactly what's been surveyed. And, you know, we were marking our sites on a different layer and we were able to have, you know, feature classes with different symbology. And it was just a really great application of it. It's a, it's a resource hog for sure. You know, it definitely pulls the battery down. So we definitely had external batteries that we had out there just to charge them up. But that's, that's basically how we use it.
00:13:09
Speaker
That's cool. Actually, I didn't really even think of it until you just mentioned it. I didn't put it in our show notes. But that ability to have on your device, your GIS, just actually came in handy a couple weeks ago on a project. We were looking for a historical structure, and we thought we found it in one area because there's some cinder block.
00:13:27
Speaker
And we were all set to do some test trenches by the cinder block. It was like, well, wait a sec. Let me see if I can do something a little differently here. Let's let's find out if we're actually in the location of the historical structure. We had an aerial photograph from 1955, I believe, that had that structure in it, as well as some roads that are still visible remnants of them are still visible on the ground.
00:13:47
Speaker
So, I took a few GPS points. I found a satellite photo in Google Earth that you could see those remnants of the roads. I keyed everything up, moved that into my GIS, put it on my phone. And when we went back onto the field, we realized that we were a good 30 yards away from where that building was.
00:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, so having the actual reference material right there on hand was phenomenally useful for us in that case. And we ended up adjusting our project accordingly. We ended up putting our units down in the place where the building actually was rather than where this other building, which wasn't the building that we were looking for, was.
00:14:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. And we were able to do a similar thing with the historic topos and dropping them in as a layer and actually, you know, driving along the historic routes and, and seeing them on the map and then be able to turn off that layer with the current topographic maps and, you know, just having all that and, you know, touch GIS allowed us to allow us to do that, which was really handy.
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah, I am going to say before we go to break here that you don't need an external GPS unit like what you were using. But if, for example, you're using an iPad, if you have like I have just an iPad touch, the basic Wi-Fi model, it doesn't have a GPS receiver. And that bit me in the ass a couple of times this summer talking about French. I guess you have to bleep that.
00:15:15
Speaker
But if you buy one that has the cell card that can take a SIM card for cellular, you can buy it outright without tying it to any particular Wi-Fi plan. And it still has a GPS receiver. And yeah, it's not as good. It's not the sub meter that you've got with the EOS arrow. But it's better than not having GPS on your device. There may be ways of pairing it to like your phone, which does have GPS, but I'm not sure how that would work.
00:15:42
Speaker
Well, and you can, I mean, it pairs through Bluetooth. So you would just use touch GIS on your phone, right? You would probably just forego the iPad and just use it there, which we've done before. That's what I did when I was looking for this building. I just used my phone. I wasn't going to bring my iPad onto the field on this project. For sure. For sure.
00:15:59
Speaker
I think it was really handy for us to have that. And also, as you said, Paul, you may not even need sub-meter GPS. If you're out doing shovel tests or you're out doing whatever, sub-meter is not necessarily required. It is required in the areas we were working in for diagnostic artifacts, datums, site boundaries, stuff like that. We always use sub-meter for those things because the agency requires it. So we needed that kind of device. But other people recording other things like non-diagnostic artifacts and flakes and stuff like that,
00:16:29
Speaker
You can easily, if you're collecting points on those things, not everybody does, but if you're collecting points on those things, you can easily just do it in another instance of touch GIS on another device without the submeter information as long as it doesn't require it. So pretty easy. Yeah. That agency required, that's one of the kind of underlining points that I think is very interesting about CRM versus academic archaeology is that so much of what's done in CRM
00:16:51
Speaker
is agency required by the shippo, by the tippo, by whatever state you're working in, you've got to do X, Y, and Z. That often doesn't exist in academic archaeology with the end result that people in academic archaeology are often reinventing the wheel, whereas people in CRM don't even have the option because it has to be done to certain specs.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, with that, let's take a break. And when we come back, you can tell us about your experience using collector on a project after you worked with us back in a minute. Chris Webster here for the archaeology podcast network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world.
00:17:33
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Casual Interlude: Podcast Beverages
00:18:47
Speaker
Welcome back to the architect podcast episode 170. And you know, we're definitely in the winter season as my wife hands me my Theraflow, my, my drink of choice right now in the evening. It's delicious. I hope, I hope Paul, you've got something better than I do right now.
00:19:04
Speaker
Voodoo Ranger Imperial IPA. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Nice. Nice. So as I mentioned before we went to the break, you know, after you left the project you were working on with us over the summer where we're using touch GIS, you did some other CRM projects and you did the Lagash project. And I mentioned you using collector. So tell us about that.
00:19:25
Speaker
The reason I'm really interested in this is because Collector is probably one of the most well-known tablet-based applications or phone-based applications that people use. And I've honestly only ever used it like once or twice. Most of the time it's been either trembles or something else I've used on a tablet. So I have shockingly little experience with Collector.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I don't have experience with setting things up in Collector, but I do have some experience now using it. Now, let me actually back up a little bit here. Because I first encountered TouchGIS, you mentioned it, I'd looked at it, I had no purpose for it, so I didn't have a dataset that I could use, except for when I was working with you in Nevada. And then TouchGIS, and I was like,
00:20:06
Speaker
this is what I've been waiting for. I stopped doing field work prior to quitting my IT job in 2021. The last time I was in the field was in 2004. I always knew what I wanted to see in the field. I've been keeping current in the literature, so I knew that people were using things like this. But just like there's a difference between reading about a site and seeing it with your own eyes, seeing it for yourself,
00:20:31
Speaker
There's a difference about reading that people are using mobile GIS and using it myself in the field. And so I saw what you had done. I saw that there was a certain amount of pre-planning in order to upload different layers of different kinds of data into the touch GIS on the tablet that was going into the field.
00:20:49
Speaker
But then once it was there, it was really straightforward for me and it made a lot of sense. And then another project, not really at liberty to talk about it much other than we used ArcGIS Collector on that project. And it was very, very similar. So it took me absolutely no time to figure it out. Fortunately, the field director showed me how to use it, but it took me no time to totally grok it.
00:21:12
Speaker
It just, it made sense. It was easy. And so now I have these two different mobile GISs that I'm trying to compare for part of this, for this Lagash project, for the survey that I'm going to do on the Lagash project. And I can't use GIS collector at the moment because you have to have a license. And so we're trying to figure out the project does have a license in Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania does have a license, but we have to make sure that all the pieces are in play.
00:21:41
Speaker
So I put together in touch GIS, which you can use in a limited capacity for free. I put together a prototype of how I would do the layering, the mapping, and so on. And then I'm going to try to reproduce the same thing in collector and compare the two, side by side, see which one makes more sense to me as a person who's going to be managing a project and doing the bulk of the actual data collection.
00:22:08
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
Comparing GIS Tools: TouchGIS vs. ArcGIS Collector
00:22:09
Speaker
Yeah. Quick note on TouchGIS and the cost there. First off, I love how you can use it for free. And I mean, really, the only reason we needed to pay for it is because of the exports. You don't get shapefile exports unless you pay for it. So realistically, you could probably set up your whole project and collect a bunch of data. There might be some restrictions. I'm not really sure because we kind of paid for it right away.
00:22:32
Speaker
Because I knew we needed it. There might be some restrictions on how much you can record. I don't know if there's project limitations or shapefile limitations or something like that, or layers or anything. But either way, we needed the exports. But it was like, I think it was $29.99 a month or something like that. So for this whole $150,000 project that we did, I paid for it for three months until we got our data out of it and then shut it off. So $90. You can't really go wrong compared to an Esri license.
00:23:00
Speaker
Yeah, so our project, we're writing this grant. And like I said, the school and the project already have some license to Esri products. The problem that I have with Esri products isn't the products themselves. It's the licensing is Byzantine to me. There are too many different subcomponents and whatnot, which is something that used to just make my blood boil when I was a systems administrator and had to install server software on Windows servers.
00:23:26
Speaker
More efforts seem to be put into licensing models than making sure the software worked. And that's not to say that the S3 products don't work because I know they do work. But wow, the licensing is totally obscure to me. But because of that licensing, I can't test it. Whereas with TouchGIS, I can test it on the free mode. And you're right, you can't export the shape files. So that leaves a big question for me that I might mention a little later.
00:23:49
Speaker
I think there's a limit on the number of projects you can have, but for this project, I only need one project, so I'm within that limit. I can really kick its tires well. Now, the problem that I potentially have with TouchGIS is that it hasn't been updated now in over a year. Part of me is worried that it's abandonware. I don't know if that's the case. I haven't been in touch with the company, which I need to do before I make any decision.
00:24:14
Speaker
That's a little unnerving to me that hasn't been updated so long. On the other hand, ArcGIS, which I haven't been able to test, ArcGIS collector is reviled by a lot of archaeologists. I had no troubles when I used it on the project, and I think that is a testament to their GIS department having thought through and preloaded the data that was necessary, the layers that are necessary, onto the iPads that we were using.
00:24:43
Speaker
I don't know how tough it is to set things up, but I suspect that a lot of the complaints people have had about using ArcGIS Collector in the field is because it hasn't been set up properly. I'm not worried about that because I'm going to be the one setting it up and I'm going to make damn sure that I set it up the way I want it.
00:25:00
Speaker
However, and here's the other, gotcha, is that a collector has now been sunlighted. Sunlighted? That's not the right word. It's been deprecated in favor of ArcGIS field maps. And looking at the Apple Store for field maps, there seems to have some stability issues, especially when it's being used offline, which is going to be the case for the iPads that we're going to have in the field at Lagash. So I do have some, you know,
00:25:28
Speaker
In terms of basic usability, I think that they're going to be very comparable, but which is going to be the better long-term solution? Because if the method that I'm putting together for this survey works,
00:25:42
Speaker
it's extensible. It can be expanded and it can be made more intensive very easily. And so I want to have something that we can rely upon for the next, let's say three years of field work. Yeah. Yeah. That would be ideal, right? Of course.
00:26:00
Speaker
Yeah. The thing that I think any solution needs to be capable of is the ability to, as we've talked about in the past with other data solutions, is the ability to get the data out in a way that is not proprietary. Right. And that's one of the reasons why I think, you know, it's interesting to me that touch GIS doesn't look like it's been updated in over a year. You know, I look at their website and everything looks fine over there and the software still works and everything looks good. And I'm like,
00:26:29
Speaker
I'm kind of thinking like, well, if it's the best solution for right now, and let's say you even used it at this project in the spring, the worst case scenario is, yeah, they abandoned the software. You update your tablet and you can no longer use the application because they didn't update the application.
00:26:45
Speaker
but you can still get shapefiles out of it and you can move on to something else and bring those shapefiles into the something else. It would be nice to use the same piece of software in perpetuity, but I don't know. The nice thing is you can get the data out and you can get data back in super easily.
00:27:02
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And I agree with you. I'm talking about the best case scenario. And I've certainly know that field work rarely meets the best case scenario that you always have to be adaptive. And you're right that having file formats, files that you can export in formats can be read in other software is key. We've talked about that plenty of times with many different things.
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah, so if I can export shape files or KMLs or something like that out of my mobile GIS solution, I can use it in ArcGIS, I can use it in QGIS, I can do whatever I want with it. KML files, I could import them directly into Google Earth if I wanted to. Just as long as I have that ability to get my data back out, I'll be okay.
00:27:49
Speaker
I'm going to have over 1700 individual data collection points. If I have to transcribe all that by hand, I'll be very upset. Yeah, that would be crazy. Let me pivot a little bit here and explain for you and for our listeners. I'm soliciting input from our listeners because I know that we have a lot of very techy, very skilled people that listen to the podcast.
00:28:15
Speaker
And if anybody hears something that raises a red flag or they hear something that triggers an idea, some way to improve upon what I'm saying, unfortunately, by the time you get this podcast, the NSF grant is going to be turned in, but we can always adjust. No, seriously, I think that I've got a solid foundation, but there may be ways of improving upon that.
00:28:37
Speaker
The way that we use Collector on that CRM project, it was an STP project.
Streamlining Projects with GIS
00:28:44
Speaker
Basically, we had a couple different fields and the GIS department pre-plotted one layer in Collector of the targets. Go to this point, go to that point, go to the other point. Me as the digger, I'd take my iPad, I'd plan myself
00:29:04
Speaker
more or less on the point in question, the SCP, and I would dig the hole and then afterwards I would add a new layer, one of two kinds, well one of three kinds, either a positive to say that we found artifacts, the negative to say that I dug the hole and there was nothing there, or a write-off because we had a lot of slope and water write-offs.
00:29:24
Speaker
Yeah. But once I visited the point, I would do the work there. There were fields already on the layer for both positives and negatives to describe the different soil layers, as well as with positives to describe what was found archaeologically, kind of artifacts were there, and then move on. And then there would now be two points for each point, the pre-plot, the ideal location of each target unit test, and then the
00:29:52
Speaker
the what I actually did there and what I actually did there included what I found there or did not find there. That was all brought back together and the next day we'd go out in the field and this would all be updated. Even though I did my transects over a year and my colleague did another set of transects over there, I would now see his transects and mine and it'll be updated nightly, which was a great system. This to me felt like really just a smart way of doing it because I didn't have to pull out my compass and
00:30:21
Speaker
pace out however many meters and then not know exactly and be able to just say, hold my hand up and say, oh yeah, I got it in this spot. I could show, I could demonstrate. It was recorded for me very simply, very quickly that I actually got to the place. Now, this isn't to say that you shouldn't be able to use a compass. This isn't saying that you shouldn't be able to pace out an even meter, but
00:30:46
Speaker
it made it so much simpler because what we were doing was extremely repetitive work. And for that extremely repetitive work, it doesn't matter that you're a grade A surveyor. What matters is that you can get your butt over a point on a map, dig a hole, and then describe what you found there. And so back to that notion of taking CRM and moving it into academic archaeology, this is the basic methodology that I want to use on Lagash.
00:31:15
Speaker
Yeah. And when it comes down to, I mean, even just shovel testing, right? And getting that survey methodology down. That is such a good way to do it is to pre-plot out all that stuff. And even if you're walking transects or you're doing something else that requires certain distance apart or distance measuring in some way or another, we're always doing something that requires some sort of distance measuring.
00:31:39
Speaker
It's just best if you can plan that out ahead of time and people, you know, everybody has their own device where they can, they can follow along and, and stay on track. Even if only one person, if you're in a line has it, you know, then at least somebody is on their line. Cause I'll tell you what, man, I did shovel testing back in the Southeast fact, where am I now in North and South Carolina was some of the first places I had worked in CRM. And you were lucky if, if, you know, there was a tremble out there.
00:32:05
Speaker
It was usually just like some of the GPS or maybe it was a terminal. Nobody individually had one. The crew chief had one and they would come over and shoot in positives if you found them. So you'd have to flag all your positives and they would shoot those in. But the negative ones, and as you're just doing your transects,
00:32:20
Speaker
they basically line you up on the road and say, okay, you're going this way at a bearing of, you know, whatever degrees and, uh, and you just composite compass and pace it out. And I'll tell you what, that is not super accurate. Everybody thinks they have a good pace and then you're, you're crashing through the forest and you, you may or may not stay on your line. Cause you're like, which tree was I looking at when I cited this in? And it's just, oh my God, it is so fraught with error. And you know, could be argued that you don't need to be like super accurate with those.
00:32:49
Speaker
when you're doing shovel testing. But that being said, if you've got a nice point to go to and it's easy and everybody has that information, then it's great. I love it. Yeah. And even if you're not doing that kind of work where you have a grid or an interval that you've got to stick to, having
00:33:06
Speaker
the mobile GIS that you've looked at and whoever's planning the day's work knows the area that should be covered in acres or hectares or whatever you're doing and has an estimate of how long that'll take. That informs so much of the project and takes away a lot of the guesswork. That guesswork
00:33:27
Speaker
I don't like because it builds up my stress level. It builds up my stress level in the same way that Munsell's built up my stress level because I can never find a match for a Munsell chip that matches what I'm looking at. That's a whole nother rant of mine.
00:33:46
Speaker
But getting rid of ambiguity as much as possible for the people who are working in the field, I think is a net positive for everybody that's trying to do their work. Even if it means that the work itself is just a little stupider, it's really not because it can be that much higher quality by getting rid of some of those vagaries of field work just because we've always done it this way in the past.
00:34:09
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. All right. Well, that sounds like a good point to take a break. So let's do that and come back and wrap up this discussion on mobile GIS and second three back in a minute.
00:34:21
Speaker
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Systematic Survey Methodology at Lagash
00:34:42
Speaker
Welcome back to Episode 170 of the archaeotech podcast and we're talking mobile GIS solutions. Paul, we're going to wrap up this segment now, so where do we go from here? Okay, this is not going to be the best podcast interface. Maybe a YouTube channel would be better for this, but I'm going to describe a little bit about what I'm doing because I think that I can describe it.
00:35:04
Speaker
I just want to hear from you and hopefully from some of the listeners, if this makes sense. So basically what I've done is I've set up a bunch of nodes, just like we had on that CRM project, across the site of Not Ur. That's a whole different dream. Across the site of Lagash in order to do surface collection.
00:35:22
Speaker
And so what I did is in QGIS, I downloaded the quick map services plugin and I pulled in actually the Bing map was the prettiest. And then from that I traced the site outline onto a new layer using polygon trace tool.
00:35:37
Speaker
And then I used the Create Grid tool using that polygon to create a regular grid. And I did that at different resolutions. So I did that at 10-meter grid, 20-meter grid, a 40-meter grid, and a 50-meter grid, or maybe 20, 25, and 50. I can't remember. It doesn't really matter. And then after that, I used the Intersection tool to basically use the site outline as a cookie cutter to get rid of all those grid points that lay outside of the site. So what I ended up with
00:36:06
Speaker
was a grid of nodes across the site itself. And from each of those, I could get a discrete count. If I did a 10 meter grid, this is how many nodes would be on the site. If I did it at a 50 meter grid, there'd be 1,783 nodes.
00:36:24
Speaker
I know that because that's what we finally decided on. Then on top of that, what I decided I was going to do for the data collection is that we're going to go in the same way that I did with those STPs, you're going to take the iPad, you're going to go to the next point on whatever your transect is, plant a stake there. The ground is soft enough that you can just drive it in with your hands with then a cord tied to the stake and then do a sweep so you get a circle. Within that, collect everything that you find on the surface in that circle.
00:36:54
Speaker
Okay. So I did that again, modeled it at various lengths. So a one meter cord, which is then give you a two meter diameter circle to five and 10 or something. I can't remember exactly. Again, doesn't really matter because at this point it's all just still math.
00:37:14
Speaker
So from that, I could tell how much of the surface area of the site would be covered with each combination of the fineness of the grid and the diameter of the circle that you collect at each one.
00:37:30
Speaker
idea of doing just full collections is there's lots of pottery and a fair amount of slag, a number of stone tools, a lot of shell. Those are the four main kinds of artifact types that we find all across the site. Anybody that's been on a Mesopotamian site knows that that's how they are. You walk across and you're stepping on pot shirts.
00:37:50
Speaker
So that would be something that you could do really quickly. Collect everything you see in that circle. That takes the individual out of it, right? If I wanted to collect, say, just diagnostic pot shirts, I could certainly do that. But that means that I, as the data collector, have to be aware of what the diagnostics might be.
00:38:11
Speaker
and have to take a lot more time actually picking them up. So anyhow, I made an assumption of how long it would take to get from one point to the next point, set up your steak and do the sweep for each of the different radii of collection.
00:38:30
Speaker
And from then, I mean, that's the big guess. Am I right with this? And from then, I could divide it up into how long it would take and divide that and come up with a figure of how many person hours it would take. And then in looking at all this, what we decided was that a 50-meter grid with a 2-meter cord, so a 4-meter diameter catchment at each point,
00:38:52
Speaker
collecting everything would get us 0.5% of the entire site in roughly 40 to 45 person days. That seemed like it was the right balance. If I'm right with my estimate of how long it's going to take, the big challenges then are we have to have an iPad for each person. That's roughly $1,000 now for the iPad and the software.
00:39:22
Speaker
We're probably going to want an extra one, depending how many people we'd send out there, maybe even two extras just in case something gets dropped and broken, and how long it takes to post-process the fines. But if we're doing a full coverage and collecting everything in those circles,
00:39:38
Speaker
what we can end up with is we can divide it in the laboratory, we can divide it up by type, we can divide it by material, by chronology for things that we can date fairly tightly like pot shirts again. And then we can take those all back into the GIS and do heat plots. So this is basically, this is taking
00:39:59
Speaker
what we were doing on the CRM project and adapting it for the surface survey. I think that it'll really work. Again, if they've got some red flags about why this wouldn't work, I would love to hear them at this point before I actually go out in the field and try to do it. But I think that this is doable.
00:40:17
Speaker
Then, in order to control the points, once we discuss this, we decided that we're doing this 50-meter grid. We discussed strategy. They want to start working in the spring in the south of the site, and they don't want to bump into us. They're also curious about finding out an area that was found in 1984 by a previous surveyor in the north of the site that they haven't relocated, but there was an extra density of, I believe, slag in that area.
00:40:42
Speaker
So they asked that I start at the north of the site. So what I did is I downloaded out of QGIS a spreadsheet of all those point coordinates, and I then just did a simple little formula that gives a name to each one. So each east-west transect starts at, it's an irregularly shaped site, but the top, the north one would be, the north transect would be transect 1, and the first point in that would be 0.1, so 1-1. And the next one down, next one south would be
00:41:13
Speaker
one debt, whatever, if you go straight south, but the first one on the next transect south would be 2.1, right? 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, but they're not going to line up vertically. But that way we can always know. And then what you do is you do your collection, you grab everything that you find on the surface there, put in a bag, call the bag, collection from transect 27.08.
00:41:40
Speaker
And then you've got 2708. We can plot that exactly back on the thing. We've recorded in another layer where we actually did the collection.
00:41:49
Speaker
If we have a negative, you get someplace and for whatever reason, there are no surface finds. We record that in the same way that if we did that STP and there was nothing in it, it was a negative. Another layer maybe for notes. I'm walking from one point to the next and I see architecture visible under the surface because sometimes it is visible depending on the moisture of the environment at the time.
00:42:10
Speaker
You know, drop a point right there so that it doesn't pollute my other stuff, and also have a point, a layer type for write-offs, right? The pre-plot accidentally put you in somebody's backyard. Let's not do that. The pre-plot accidentally put me in the canal. I'm not going to go there. And that renamed spreadsheet then. I imported back into QGIS.
00:42:35
Speaker
export as a KML and imported that into TouchGIS, which sounds like a lot of steps, but in my mind, they make a lot of sense. It was very boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, from one to one. And using tools that I already know, using a process I do and I could explain to my colleagues and they said, yeah, that kind of makes sense. But again, from you and from anybody else, I'd like to hear why it might not work or if there's a way of improving upon that. Yeah. I mean, this is really interesting approach and it really comes down to
00:43:04
Speaker
why people choose the survey intervals and data collection methods that they do, right? With me not knowing a whole lot about the Lagash site, I'm really curious about, I'm personally curious about what is on the surface. You know what I mean? Is this stuff that is contemporaneous with the time period that Lagash was inhabited or is this stuff that was much later and you're just trying to get this off the surface so you can start digging in some places and sign it. Or, or is this really like an erosional surface expression of the thing you're actually
00:43:34
Speaker
looking for. Yeah, no, that's actually a great point. And that's one of the reasons why Lagash is really, really a useful test site for this because even though it's a humongous site and in the late, early dynastic of Mesopotamia, so roughly around 2300 BCE, it was the largest site in the area and probably the most powerful as well.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah. But it wasn't occupied for very long. So most of the sites there have a fair amount of accumulation and they stick up visibly over the surrounding plane. Lagash doesn't really a whole lot. There are a couple of spots on the site that are taller, but for the most part, it's a very flat low site. And previous surveys that have been done there show that the majority of the material all dates to that same time period when this was the preeminent site in Mesopotamia.
00:44:24
Speaker
So because of that, most of what we're going to find is going to be roughly contemporaneous. I said we could look at chronology with potsherds because we can't look at chronology with slag. We're not going to be able to look at chronology with shell. With stone, if they're carved into distinctive vessels or statuary, we could look at chronology. But if it's just a piece of something that's hard to tell what it might have been from,
00:44:50
Speaker
We're not going to tell chronology. Potches, we probably can, but for the most part, what we're looking for is looking for use areas. We're looking for those areas of the site that have higher concentrations of slag in particular, but also shell, pottery, especially say, if we found a lot of pot wasters, kiln wasters, that might tell us that, hey, the kilns were in this part of the site.
00:45:11
Speaker
Right? And so we can plot all these things against each other, then use that for further seasons of exploration. And we also have other plans for thermal photography, drone photography, I'm actually working on a separate part of the ground for that, and other things like magnetic cradiometry and resistivity and so on. So these are all going to inform each other. But
00:45:38
Speaker
I think that this as the surface collection should work. I think that if I got my estimates right, we can do it within a year. It takes the individual very much out of it. I'm not trying to take the individual out of it because I
00:45:53
Speaker
I'm going to be doing the work myself. We have at least one surveyor and that's me. It's not a matter of being punitive towards the individuals. It's to take the variability between person A and person B out of it, which opens up options for us. If somebody can make it out of the field one day or they finish up whatever they're working on early,
00:46:13
Speaker
We can quickly show them how to use the iPad and get them out in the field. If we have students that come down from Baghdad, for example, it'd be wonderful to take some archaeology students, some Iraqis, you know, and show them and have them work side by side with us. That would be a real positive outcome of this. And I think that it's a system that's simple enough that we could do that.
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah. If you haven't heard it in my voice, I'm really excited about the prospect of this working. That's maybe just the problem. I'm a little too excited. I've got a real big blind spot on something that I'm not considering here.
00:46:48
Speaker
The only thing that jumps out at me as a project manager is time. It's always about time, especially with a project where you've got to fly in, you have a return plane ticket. It's not like CRM where maybe we can just go back out next week, right? And we can dismiss the rest of the crew and we can clean up some stuff. That's literally not a possibility.
00:47:10
Speaker
The only thing I'm thinking of is your estimate on how long it's going to take somebody to do this four meter diameter circle and collect all the stuff. Because you have a lot of factors at play, right? How much stuff is in that circle? How quickly is somebody at collecting when you're dealing with CRM?
00:47:29
Speaker
Yeah, you can probably convince field techs to just start dumping a bunch of stuff in a bag and worry about it later, right? Just write a label on the outside. When you're dealing with academics, possibly students, they're going to sit and examine every single piece and go, look how cool this is and call somebody over. And they're going to dwell on it rather than drop it in a bag and catalog it later. You know what I mean? They don't have that CRM mentality necessarily. And
00:47:52
Speaker
So there's that. And then there's also, you know, anytime I think we're going to get this much done, I dropped 20% for people being sick and weather. So yeah, I mean, that's all fair. That's, that's all absolutely fair. And that's, that's where I recognize is the big unknown is, you know, did my estimate of how long it's going to take? Is that the correct thing? Cause everything up to that estimate is just math.
00:48:15
Speaker
Yeah, there's no changing it. The math that goes into that estimate is an estimate. It's a guess on my part how long it's going to take. And there's going to be some variability there from one person to the next, from one part of the site to the next, dependent on whether people's health, you know, all the above. But if it turns out that I was off, and mind you, I used to always assume that I budget out the time for a particular project in IT, and then I double that.
00:48:43
Speaker
And then that's what I tell my boss. That's how long it's going to take. Yeah. Right. I learned that from Star Trek as a Scotty. Yeah. But I always use that because not because that makes me look great when I've done it under the deadline, but because more often than not, I'm bumping up against that double the amount of time I expected deadline. Yeah.
00:49:04
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. So we're going to see. But if it turns out that I'm wrong, the math is easy enough to do. Say, oh, geez, everything took three times longer than I thought. It's not going to take 40 days. It's going to take 120 days. Well, now we know how many people will have to throw at the project. Yeah. And it's a little different than what you were saying about the fieldwork in that they don't expect the whole thing to be done in the first season. I have high hopes of being done in one season.
00:49:28
Speaker
But they're like, well, if you don't get done in the first season and we have to push this into the fall, it's fine because you've already hit the part of the site that we care about most. This is project management. Right. And it's not like they're putting a Walmart up there over the summer. No, that's true. Unless the rack plans to do something with that land and it really is kind of a press on this, then
00:49:53
Speaker
I mean, you really have an unlimited amount of time to be honest. I mean, you have to get your time estimates somewhat accurate just for your funding sources, right? So you're not way off on that and you're managing those expectations, but otherwise it's kind of a good position to be in. So I like it. Hey, just in the last minute here, and this probably isn't enough time to even talk about this, but one other thing I was curious about is your 50 meter interval. And one of the reasons we choose intervals
00:50:18
Speaker
where we're working in CRM is based on the likelihood of site sizes that we're going to find. We hope that our interval crosses over a section of something that could be a site, right? I mean, we record isolates when we find them, but we really don't necessarily care about isolates for the most part. We're looking for sites and we're hoping to cross paths with those. So what do you think you would miss on a 50 meter interval? You know what I mean? That's something you have to think about.
00:50:44
Speaker
Yeah, so what I would miss on a 50 meter interval is variability within neighborhoods. What I'm hoping to find at this interval is different sectors of the site because the whole thing is a site. Different sectors of the site that are devoted more to certain types of behaviors than other types. This is where it looks like there's a lot of shell. For some reason, let's figure it out. Maybe they were processing shell here. Here's a lot of slag.
00:51:09
Speaker
Well, we're smelting here. Here's a lot of kiln wasters. They probably were doing pottery here. But we don't care about the fine detail of one building to the next, which we would definitely not get with this. But that's the other thing about this, and I've already sold the team on this, is that the same methodology can be done at a higher density. It can be done at a higher density in two ways, tighter grid and or bigger catchment.
00:51:38
Speaker
And so once we've identified an area that we want to investigate a little more carefully prior to excavation, if we ever do intend to excavate, we could do the same thing on a 10 meter grid with a 10 meter catchment and get almost a hundred percent. Nice. Nice. Well, there you go. All right. Well, this sounds really cool and looking forward to hearing the results and how this all works out. Should you guys, hopefully you guys get the funding and you get to go out there in the spring.
00:52:05
Speaker
Fingers crossed. That'd be really awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Paul. And thanks, everybody, for listening. And check out our information in the show notes. You can hit up Paul on Twitter or through his email address. Both of those are in the show notes. Just look down at your phone. They're sitting right there, since you're probably listening to this on your mobile device. And let him know what you think about his survey methodology and how he can improve it. Yeah, please do.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. All right. Well, thanks, Paul. Thanks, everybody. We hope you had a good 2021 since this is our first release in 2022. Hopefully the new year went off without a hitch for you. And we hope everybody has, like I said, a good and prosperous 2022. So we will see you next time. Take care.
00:52:53
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.
00:53:18
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:53:45
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 arcpotnet.com slash members for more info.