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The Changing Landscape of Archaeological Survey - Ep 195
846 Plays1 year ago
Though excavation is pretty much synonymous with archaeological fieldwork in the popular and professional imagination, the bulk of the work that we, as archaeologists, do is survey. In the decades that Chris and Paul have been doing archaeological survey we’ve seen great improvements in how they can be planned and carried out, in large part do to tech that’s more ubiquitous, robust, and cheaper than it was when we started. Today we discuss what we’ve already gained and what we hope the future brings.
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For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/195
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- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeotech Podcast Ep 195
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, episode 195. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about archaeological survey, what it was like when we both started, where it's at now, and where it's going. Let's get to it.
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going?
Innovations in Surveying Tech
00:00:25
Speaker
It's going pretty good. Still on that creative kick that I've been on. The latest thing I'm working on, I've got it sitting in front of me right now, is a little weather sensor for surveying. So one of the things that happens when you're doing total social surveying is you've got to have, well,
00:00:40
Speaker
you should have atmospheric corrections. Just the corrections are on the order of parts per million, so it doesn't matter unless you're doing a lot of long distance runs. But I incorporated the atmospheric corrections into my program and
00:00:56
Speaker
I wanted a little handheld weather sensor that could tell me the barometric pressure and the temperature. I have not been able to find one that just does those two simple things online unless I want to spend a lot of money. I've been goofing around with little things I could program and I found the other day for just a couple bucks online a little
00:01:15
Speaker
fairly accurate temperature and sensor chip called a BMP280. I had a Raspberry Pi Pico sitting around, which is a tiny little Arduino kind of thing that you program with Python. I had a little display and then I found somebody online had a description of doing exactly what I wanted to do. I put them together and it worked.
00:01:36
Speaker
I've been modifying the code and now I bought a slightly smaller microcontroller that runs on the same chip. I just got that put together. Now I've seen a little bit of programming, a little bit of soldering. There'll be some 3D printing and I should have a sub $20 little pressure and temperature sensor gizmo that I can take with me into the field when I do surveying. I'm pretty excited about that.
00:02:00
Speaker
And then the other big creative thing and that's why I queued up today's topic is I'm starting to work on a couple articles based off of the surface survey that I did at Lagash.
Creative Projects and Social Media
00:02:11
Speaker
So not the magnetometry survey, but the surface field walking collection kind of survey. Yeah, so still going hard with all these creative projects. I think that being off Twitter is doing me a world of good.
00:02:25
Speaker
Nice. Nice. Well, Hey, we didn't talk about this ahead of time. So it's kind of, kind of fun just to talk about it now. But you know, when I had the RV that we had before this, we had really inaccurate temperature readings inside the refrigerator and the freezer. And we also didn't have like super great seals. And I had a problem with the gas solenoid going out on that thing all the time. And, and it wouldn't, and I wouldn't know. So then all of a sudden it would just be warm inside the refrigerator.
00:02:49
Speaker
So I was looking for a way to monitor these and we actually had a whole Victron energy set up. And Victron, and this is how I found what the link I just sent in the chat for you. Victron actually enabled the ability for the Victron devices to actually read these little sensors from a company called Ruvi, R-U-U-V-I.
00:03:10
Speaker
I think they're out of the Netherlands or something like that. And these sensors are, they have the little coin batteries in them, like a 2032 or something like that that lasts forever. It does motion. So it'll, it'll, it'll tell you when there's movement, it does pressure, it does temperature, and it does humidity. And I've actually got three of those or actually four of those space throughout the house. I've got one in the wine refrigerator because I'll tell you what, my wine better be at the right temperature and I'm going to get a warning if it's not very important.
00:03:39
Speaker
I know. And I've got, now we've got a residential fridge now, but since I already had these sensors, I put them in there anyway. I've got one in the freezer and one in the refrigerator. And then I've actually got one outside in our water bay because if our water pump freezes overnight, when we're in these cold temperatures, it could crack and or do something bad to the water, to the water pump. So I'm usually aware of what the temperatures are going to be. So I either put a little ceramic heater I've got in there or I make sure our bay heat is turned on and is going in there. But just in case through the Ruby app,
00:04:09
Speaker
it will send me a push notification and alert on my phone if it's outside of a tolerance that I set up for temperature and you can set other tolerances in there as well.
Temperature Monitoring with Ruvi Sensors
00:04:18
Speaker
So it's actually pretty cool. I think they were like 20 bucks a piece. I bought a pack of four of them and they've been just like super easy and super great and just Bluetooth to my phone. And you can get what's called a Ruby station too, that they will Bluetooth to that and that will connect to the internet. So you can actually read those from anywhere in the world. I don't have that, but I just have the Bluetooth sensors. So
00:04:38
Speaker
kind of another option for people looking for something like that. It's pretty neat. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. I'm going to definitely take a look at that because my mom just had a bit of a catastrophe at her house where it's a fairly recent construction and they didn't put the pipes in her bathroom in the right place. They are on an external wall. So while she was away, they froze. She lives in Minnesota. They froze
00:05:02
Speaker
She cracked, flooded her house. My God. So now she's having repairs made. They've torn up half the floor, hardwood floor, of course. They've torn half of it up so that they can replace it. It's going to be a real mess. But something like this, if we could get it in a place, maybe put an access panel or something so that we could get it in that wall, we could monitor that and keep this from ever happening again. Because I think it happened once before, just not as badly as it did this time.
00:05:30
Speaker
Yeah. And if you get the station and as long as your internet doesn't go down, so AKA your power doesn't go out or you've got your router on an interruptible power supply or something like that, if it's a real problem, yeah, you'd be able to do whatever you want. So this is actually really good for people listening to this to bring it back to archeology, you know, people doing like collections management and stuff like that. Now, I mean,
00:05:49
Speaker
real like legit museums. They have temperature centers all over the place, but you may be working at a smaller place that's kind of in the back room of a little community museum or something. And something like this is a very affordable way to monitor the atmospheric conditions wherever you put the sensor. So, and it seems, seems pretty accurate. So, Oh, that's great. All right. Well, today's topic, you were thinking about this and we're talking about the changing landscape of archeological survey as the title
Drones in Archaeological Surveys
00:06:16
Speaker
indicates. And
00:06:17
Speaker
You know, we've talked a lot about how survey is changing and should change. I've had continuing thoughts about drone survey and, you know, especially after I've mentioned this a million times on the podcast, but after working in China Lake around China Lake Naval Weapons Center, let me get the whole title in there. And after walking around where they say, hey, anything metal, don't touch it because it might explode. You know, call over the unexploded ordnance specialist to check it out and report it in. I'm like, OK, that's not terrifying or anything. What are we even doing out here?
00:06:47
Speaker
So, you know, that's when my thoughts on drone survey first started to take shape. But what brought you to this topic for the podcast today? So, like I said, when I, on the intro, I was thinking about it because I'm currently working on a couple different articles based off of that surface survey that I did.
00:07:05
Speaker
And just to bring it back to the podcast here is that when I started conceiving of this survey, which we started in the spring 2022 season of the Lagash Project and we completed in this past fall season, so just over a month ago now, I
00:07:23
Speaker
had some ideas and I want to discuss them. You and I discussed them on air on this podcast and we got some really good feedback on the Slack channel about things that I could do or things I should consider, ways to display the data, ways to try to interpret the data.
00:07:41
Speaker
I think that I've got a pretty good system, and so I'd like to write it up in a couple different formats. One would be more of a cookbook, to go back to what we were discussing last episode, more of a cookbook for AAP, and then another one, which we haven't decided the venue yet, it might be Sumer, which is Mesopotamian focused
00:08:03
Speaker
journal, you know, scholarly journal. We really want that one to be co-authored by me and the Iraqis that I worked with when I was there. They're professionals themselves. They deserve to be on this. They did the bulk of the work, you know. So, you know, I'll write it. They'll, we'll translate it. They'll go through, add their edits. We'll put together something that looks then at the results and tries to interpret the results. So, you know, the first half, the first article will be a
00:08:29
Speaker
what we're doing and the second half will be what we found out by what we did. So long-winded way of saying that I've been doing a lot of background research now on an archaeological survey.
Technological Advancements in Archaeology
00:08:42
Speaker
I did a whole lot in the past. My dissertation itself was based off of a survey. But I haven't kept up on the literature.
00:08:51
Speaker
I have an intuitive sense of what people have done and what the overall landscape, to reuse that term, of the field of archaeological survey has been like. And I know that it's changed a lot over the years. But if I'm going to be publishing things in scholarly journals, I need to be able to cite. I can't just say, oh, yeah, I'm sure somebody did this. That's just not going to fly.
00:09:14
Speaker
So, I've been up to my ears in journal articles. Some of the earliest stuff goes all the way back to the 60s, but there's actually been a lot that's gone on over the last 15 years or so. Basically, covering the time period between when I dropped out of archaeology as a profession and now that I'm back into it. So, I've just had survey on my mind and one of the things that strikes me all the time
00:09:43
Speaker
especially with respect to that Lagash surface survey is how much things have changed because of technology. We've been talking a lot lately about digital archaeology, and I feel like the digital around archaeology, whether or not we want to call it digital archaeology, has really made archaeological survey
00:10:06
Speaker
a much more viable, that's not quite the word I'm looking for, much more of an even partner to excavation in terms of the tools and techniques that are brought to bear. So it's rattling around in the back of my head in kind of the same way that I came with a bunch of ideas rattling around in the back of my head to discuss how to start this project. I wanted to discuss with you, not really purposefully for these articles, but
00:10:33
Speaker
just kind of what has changed while you've been doing it? You and I have both been at the archaeological survey doing it for a couple decades now. And we've seen a lot of things change. And yeah, I've got a bunch of ideas. I'm just not going to run on forever and ever. But where would we want to start with this?
00:10:52
Speaker
Well, I think starting personally, I see looking at the things that have changed and probably will change and need to change in survey can be kind of put into two categories for me, at least for the things I'm thinking of right now. The first one is how we do the survey.
00:11:07
Speaker
I mentioned drone survey as a way to do like a pre initial survey. So sending some sort of automated thing out there or satellite imagery that is of a really, really, really, really fine resolution, which we don't really have access to yet, but we may at some point in the future.
00:11:24
Speaker
Or, again, using drone imagery and AI machine learning to look at those images. And again, you would need something that is of the resolution where you can actually see the types of things we want to record, not just features, but artifacts and things like that. It could be that we send land-based robots or something out looking way into the future. I keep thinking of that Boston Dynamics dog thing that is just terrifying that just could have sensors on it that just goes... I hate that thing. I know, right? It lives near you too. It could just be in your backyard.
00:11:54
Speaker
No, it couldn't. We'll have a blanket thrown over it and dumped in the lake, I promise you. Nice, nice. So I see the method of us actually doing the survey as something that's definitely evolved. Our thoughts around how we do that, the technology we use, the pre-survey type of stuff we do before we're actually boots on the ground, those kinds of things have definitely evolved. But then also, it's like how we record what we find and how we manage that. I remember seeing a paper
00:12:23
Speaker
What was it? It was at least five, six years ago, which means probably well before this, people were thinking about this, but there was a CRM company doing a massive survey where a lot of times when we're out there doing survey, like you and I have worked together, you're in a 30 meters apart or 20 meters apart, whatever the case may be. You're walking along, when somebody finds something, everybody comes together, you scatter around that thing and you see if there's anything else close to it. If there is, if there's enough to qualify it as a site, you record it as a site.
00:12:49
Speaker
Well,
GIS and Efficient Fieldwork
00:12:50
Speaker
the other method that I saw that was really intriguing, and I don't know if it's really caught on, was these people were basically doing a similar thing, except they were much closer together. And if somebody found something, they searched in a 10 by 10 meter grid. And everything within that 10 by 10 meter grid was recorded, point plotted on a GPS and saved. No sites were determined. They just recorded everything.
00:13:11
Speaker
And then they did that across the entire site and then used GIS and the rules over what makes a site to basically draw boundaries. They just simply didn't do it in the field. I don't know how they handle photographs and all that stuff as far as site photographs and things, but maybe they go back and do it. I don't know, but that was interesting to me. So that's, that's kind of where I see the conversation is what are we recording and how are we doing that? And then how are we actually collecting the data?
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's a nice way to break it down between the planning and the doing, because they've both seen big changes. And maybe let's jump into this after the break. But what my way of coming at it is that in the academic world,
00:13:48
Speaker
The survey, even though archaeological survey has been part of doing fieldwork since the start of the field, it's over a hundred years old. People had to know where the sites were before they could dig them. But that was the extent of it initially. You wanted to locate the site and then you didn't care about how it was done or why it was done or anything else. The important thing was then having the site so you could dig it. But what we've seen over the past couple of decades is that archaeological survey has become
00:14:17
Speaker
from being a little brother to excavation to being a peer, and a lot of that's come out, or that's within the academic archaeology sphere.
00:14:28
Speaker
But within CRM, which is where you've come at it, it has not had that same sort of stigma against it that it has in academic archaeology. It's sometimes been the only thing that's done. It's not done in service of excavation. It's often done for its own ends. Maybe it's the CRM world having creeped into the
00:14:57
Speaker
academic? I don't think so. I think maybe it's probably just the availability of all these new techniques and technologies that have allowed the people who are doing the lesser kind of work to really ramp up faster than those who were doing the excavation.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I'm just, again, it's ideas just rattling around in my head, not directed in any particular way, just trying to get a good sense of what has changed because I know a lot has and I've been involved in a lot that has and, you know, keep it open-ended and let's see where we go. Yeah, exactly. Well, let's see where we go at the end of the segment and into segment two. How about that? We'll take a break and we'll be back in a minute.
00:15:38
Speaker
Welcome back to The Architect podcast, episode 195. Chris and I are discussing surveying in archaeology. Well, not serving like the total station kind of surveying, which I'm always happy to talk about, but the doing archaeological survey, finding sites, looking within sites, whatever, without necessarily digging and how it's changed. And Chris, you pointed out something really good that you start to outline the changes, not just in survey,
00:16:05
Speaker
were at large, like I was thinking about it, but between the planning and the doing. And I think that's a really good way of breaking it down. So let's dive right into these in that order and talk about the planning. What ways has planning archaeological survey for you as the owner of a CRM company changed since you've been doing this?
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think it really comes down to budgets. You try to do things as cost-effective as possible, which is a nice way of saying as cheap as possible. And realistically, if we could employ everybody and pay them a great wage, then we would do that. But honestly, you have to find the best way to
00:16:46
Speaker
figure out what your survey is going to be, how you're going to do it. All that's going to happen along the way there, and then put the people out on the ground. If you put people out on the ground too soon, and they've got to figure some stuff out, well, now you've got people burdened time at $150 an hour trying to figure out where they're supposed to go and what they're supposed to do. And that's a lot how I was directed. Wait a sec. Wait a sec. I got to stop you right there. $150 an hour?
00:17:14
Speaker
Well, I got to talk to the people that employ me then. Now, this is a good time to direct people to the CRM Archaeology Podcast, where we often talk about the difference between billable rates and your actual pay rates. Good plug there for the CRMARK Podcast, Paul.
00:17:35
Speaker
So, I mean, honestly though, mine isn't even 150. I think my billable rates, there's usually like a multiplier. So if I'm paying somebody, I don't know, pull out a round number, like $30 an hour, my multiplier is about 2.4, I think. So that means my billable rate for them is somewhere around $70 an hour, give or take. And that just means, you know, I'm able to cover obviously my insurance, my expenses, all that stuff that's not covered in your salary, plus your taxes, right? So whatever taxes you pay, I'm also paying. So,
00:18:05
Speaker
Yes. As a business owner, you have to figure out all those things. And when it comes down to it, like the survey that we did with a couple other companies out in Nevada a couple of years ago, we spent a lot of time, me and the other two company owners. One of them was working on the GIS side. One of them was working on the report.
00:18:22
Speaker
and my company was focusing mainly on the survey itself. But those two companies, one of them, she's collecting all this data from the Forest Service saying, okay, what are we recording? What makes a site? What are all the previously recorded sites? Getting those into a GIS. And then the other guy looking at the GIS is doing slope analysis because we're not recording over certain slopes. We're identifying all the roads and we're putting all that on a map before we even go out into the field and do any surveys.
00:18:50
Speaker
realistically, we should just be able to walk up to an area and we know we have to survey here. We know about what we're going to find if there's previously recorded sites and we get on it and we do it. And that saves time. So from a very limited standpoint, that is how we make things a little bit more efficient. Now, if we had a lot more money, we may have incorporated a lot more like maybe satellite imagery or like I said, even drone flights and things like that. But
00:19:16
Speaker
you know, oftentimes there just isn't the time for that at scales that I work at. Yeah. Well, that's no, that's slope analysis that you just mentioned was, was actually one of the things I was thinking of because that I can really imagine that as a, uh, a business owner, that that's huge, right? If you can,
00:19:37
Speaker
pre-write off a certain amount of territory that has to be covered because it's hazardous. You cannot physically, safely go and survey it. That gives you the opportunity to give the client a much better estimate of how long it's going to take and how much money it's going to take.
00:19:55
Speaker
So that's a big one, and that wouldn't always have been possible, but now with the rise of GIS tools, it's fairly easy. The big gotcha in it is, of course, the quality of the base imagery that you've got.
00:20:12
Speaker
Those DTMs that tell you what you're going to extract what the slope is from. But what we found, and to the credit of the guy that was doing the GIS, was that it was pretty good. There weren't many places that he marked that we shouldn't go, that we could have gone. And conversely, there weren't many places that we didn't want to go that he didn't already flag.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah. And that's that, that I think is another thing has changed, which is the quality of information coming from the client, especially a big one, like the one we were working with, you know, they're, they're managing a lot of land across both BLM and or service, uh, least properties. And they already had really high resolution detailed imagery and digital elevation models of their entire property. And they let us, they gave us access to all of that. If we didn't have that with these highly sloped areas and these mountainous terrains,
00:20:59
Speaker
we'd have been in a world of hurt trying to get to some places that ultimately we didn't even have to survey. You know what I mean? Just to get there to find that out. So yeah, we took the total acreage that we had to survey, which was in the tens of thousands and dropped probably 70% of it out because of slope, because of cliff sides and things like that. And man, just the, I mean, this, this project would have been several million dollars instead of, you know, a fraction of that.
00:21:22
Speaker
So yeah. Yeah. And having been on that survey team, I'm thankful that we didn't have to climb up and down every slope because all those really, really were treacherous. Yeah. And you're already starting a high altitude too.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yeah, the availability of that imagery, whether it's a LiDAR imagery that's provided by a private company.
Imagery and Data in Survey Planning
00:21:44
Speaker
Most of the states, I believe, in the US now have LiDAR imagery that you can download. I've used that myself. Actually, without throwing anybody under the bus here, I did a project. I was working on a small project, and we were asked to find a building that we knew existed in an area. And the person that asked us to do a couple test trenches, and he located where
00:22:05
Speaker
we were supposed to work. We looked and decided that what we were told was not actually the correct location. After the project wrapped up, I found New York State had some lidar data freely available, downloaded it, looked at it, and could see the footprint of the building where we had figured that it was as opposed to where we were told it was going to be.
00:22:26
Speaker
even though that building was long gone. The planning with available imagery, that's a huge thing because when I was doing my dissertation, the available imagery that I had when I started in 1997 versus when I finished the fieldwork data collection in 2004 across those six, seven years was tremendous, the amount of things that became available. Not just new higher resolution things, but other things that
00:22:55
Speaker
the model for the accessing them had changed. So I used to have to get permission and pay money to maybe the government body that collected it. I can't even remember who at this point in order just to access it to determine if it was going to be useful for me or not.
00:23:13
Speaker
And by the end of it, it was like, yeah, just sign up for our free account on our website and download at your leisure. You're totally right. That has changed so much in just the past few years. I remember that even when I first started doing my own projects for my own company in Nevada, just like 10 years ago. And just even getting USGS topo maps was a pain in the ass. You know what I mean? Just trying to find those and pick them up. But now they're almost available just about anywhere. And they're updated and really good.
00:23:42
Speaker
all the other imagery and different things you might need that's usually accessible somewhere, you may still have to pay for it in some cases, depending on who collected it. But in general, if it's a government resource, and you don't need a paper copy of something, you can take a digital one, you can almost always get it for free, if it's like a map or something like that. So yeah, you're still going to pay for paper copies if you need those. But if you just need the files, I mean, more often than not, you could just get those. So that's really good. Yeah. And then parallel to that is, which we've already mentioned, is the use of GIS.
00:24:12
Speaker
how it went from being kind of, you know, when I started in the 90s, it went from being a niche thing to being something that's expected. And it's expected that every company above a certain size has GIS specialists on, every academic project has a GIS component, and every archaeologist is at least conversant with GIS, if not, you know.
00:24:33
Speaker
facile with it. That has been really cool to me as somebody who's always liked it. It's a set of tools or a way of looking at the world that always just intuitively resonated with me. I'm really curious about the availability of this kind of data in other countries. I have no doubt that we're going to have a spirited conversation with our Belgian friend
00:24:54
Speaker
who's a member of the archaeology podcast network. He always frequently comments with really insightful things to say on a number of our shows, especially the archaeo tech episodes. So looking forward to that. If you want to join in that conversation, arcpodnet.com forward slash members, and you can join our Slack team and continue the conversation. But
00:25:12
Speaker
Otherwise, Paul, I don't know how much you've been involved in the planning stages aside from, say, Lagash and some of those things right over there, but some of the other projects you've done in other parts of the world, do you have any sense of the availability of this kind of data in those places?
00:25:27
Speaker
It's variable. I mean, a lot of places that I've worked still the best topo data, unless you have access to something that was done by, say, a geological firm, an oil company or a military, and those are all usually held pretty close to the vest. Some of the best imagery we've got for elevations is still SRTM, which is not nearly detailed enough for
00:25:54
Speaker
really anything that I would ever do, which is a shame. It's good on landscape scales, but not on landscape with the detail that archaeologists like to look at the landscape. So my impression thus far has been that it's pretty hard. Now that said, a lot of aerial imagery like spy satellite imagery has become readily accessible. And so people that I work with have gotten access to that. And that's also interesting because
00:26:22
Speaker
Most of it dates to the 80s and earlier, and it gives us a view of the landscape and the landscape changing at a fairly high resolution that requires the tools that we currently have available, say Google Earth or Google Maps or whatever.
00:26:42
Speaker
It requires that over a period of time. In the Lagash case, we're looking at the site of Lagash in the 80s when it was being excavated. In the 70s when it was being excavated, we got some stuff from the 60s or the 50s. You can tie those then in with other historical documents and try to understand the landscape in a different way, maybe not strictly an archaeological way.
00:27:03
Speaker
But it does give us a perspective that we didn't have prior. And again, that's nothing new other than the new availability of these things. Because in the height of the Cold War, nobody was going to divulge any of that. But now some of these images sets are available.
00:27:22
Speaker
which is, again, a long winded way of me is saying that, yeah, it's extremely variable from country to country and not just country to country, but where you are in country to country, where you are and what it is that you want to see. But if you want something very current, very accurate, it may not exist or may not exist where you have access to it. But overall, the access to these things has gotten better and more comprehensive over time.
00:27:44
Speaker
OK, well, let's take our final break and come back on the other side. In the meantime, you can really help us out by looking down at the device and seeing what you're listening to this podcast on. And if it's Apple podcast, go leave a review or at least a rating. Let us know how we're doing or what you hate and, you know.
00:28:01
Speaker
call us a bunch of frauds. That's okay. We can take it. And we take reviews on Spotify as well. And you know what? If you want to let us know that you did that, cause those services don't let us know, you know, hit us up on, you know, you can send me an email, chris at archeology podcast, network.com. Paul's contact information is also in the show notes. You can just look down and you can see that. So send us a, send us a note and let us know that you left a review if you want to. Otherwise we really appreciate it. We'll be back in a minute for segment three.
00:28:26
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archaeotech podcast, episode 195. And we're talking about the changing landscape of archaeological survey, as the title suggests. And we're wrapping up this topic in segment three here, Paul. Where do you see things going from here? What have we got left to talk about regarding archaeological survey changing as you see it?
00:28:44
Speaker
So, from the academic archaeology perspective, what I've seen change is as it becomes more and more of a peer to excavation, it's being applied at a variety of different scales, right? And so there's this greater understanding. Maybe this is coming out of the GIS world, you know, where we're thinking about the world and landscapes at a variety of different scales and phenomena, a variety of different scales and effects.
00:29:08
Speaker
But like I said, initially, it was to find where the sites were that you're going to excavate. Then through landscape archaeology, there's a lot of interrogation of what the relationship is of different sites and non-site areas too. But then some of the same tools, and this is kind of where my Lagash survey comes in, some of the same tools can be applied not just between sites and to locate sites and around sites, but actually within sites.
00:29:33
Speaker
And again, this is nothing new. The work that I've done in Lagash in many ways builds off of work that was done by Elizabeth Carter in 1984 on the same site. So this has been going on for quite a while, and maybe it's just me and maybe it's just the things I've been reading, but it seems like there's been just a growing appreciation and a growing comfort with the tools of archaeological survey in archaeology writ large, both academic archaeology and NCRM archaeology.
00:30:02
Speaker
And a big part of that is I think that the tool set that we're using for actually doing it is converging. So we were discussing GIS and that gets applied in multiple scales. We've, I'm sure, reviewed articles on this podcast where people are using the tools of GIS for analyzing things at the level of the trenches and the architecture within those trenches.
00:30:28
Speaker
So it's not just a landscape tool anymore, but archaeologists are using it for fairly small things. So I think that that's just kind of an underlying theme of what's happened. But then as those tools converge, there are a whole bunch of different tools that I could point to that we use daily in a bunch of different ways.
00:30:48
Speaker
And I think the interesting thing about that, right, is and especially, I mean, we have a kind of a different view on this because we're always talking about these things and we talk to people who are of like mind because otherwise we probably wouldn't be talking to them. But I feel like I feel like the industry as a whole, especially like CRM and then, you know, academia, it seems like they're always because people have to do unique research and different things. They're always trying to find some way to to kind of do something new, it seems. So that's kind of pushing things forward. But from a CRM standpoint,
00:31:18
Speaker
Even though there's still definitely people out there that are doing the same thing they've always done, old school methods on doing certain things, I think what's changed is they know they should be doing something different versus like 10, 15 years ago.
00:31:34
Speaker
they're like, oh, you know, this is how it's done and we're going to do this thing. But now they're like, in the back of their mind, I feel like they know that they could be doing more. They know that there's something else that they could apply to this survey to make it better, to make it easier, to make it more efficient, you know, something like that. And I think that shift is really starting to happen. It's probably a generational shift, to be honest with you, but it also could be things like, I mean, not to toot our own horn, but things like this podcast and other papers and other journals highlighting
00:32:02
Speaker
the technological advances that people are making in archaeological survey and beyond, and that being more ubiquitous and just kind of getting in people's brains. You know what I mean? So much like digital archaeology, removing the word digital and assuming it's all digital archaeology, I feel like archaeological survey is
00:32:21
Speaker
set for a paradigm shift a little bit, where it's really going to be changing in the next 10 years on how we do it. Yeah, I think that you're right. And I think that actually the change may have already started or happened even.
Survey vs Excavation: Shifting Paradigms
00:32:34
Speaker
It's just the reception of it is changing. And we may see that full receptions change to the point that one doesn't have to necessarily specify archaeological excavation or archaeological survey and just says,
00:32:48
Speaker
and it's understood that it could be either or both, or one side or the other, weighted one way or the other, depending on the needs, and that there isn't that kind of hierarchy of, well, you found it in survey, but what does that really tell us?
00:33:02
Speaker
I mean, we who do survey know that there are all sorts of complicating factors, taphonomic processes, questions of chronology, displacement of objects, blah, blah, blah. But if we have a set of tools that we're using and a set of methods that we're using that can then assuage people's concerns that, is that real archaeology? I think that we're really getting close to that point, you know, if we haven't already crossed over into it.
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, but just like you said, as we've kind of crossed over into it, the tools are becoming more readily available too, right? Just take photography, for example. Absolutely. I know when I first started out, we had point and shoot cameras on almost every project that weren't even digital SLRs. A lot of them were just point and shoot digital cameras. At least they were digital. I didn't really
00:33:51
Speaker
I came in when the only thing that was really using film, maybe, and this was right at the beginning of my archaeological career, was architectural stuff had to be taken with a black and white camera that was a film camera that had to be developed in certain states. That's all transitioned to digital now, as far as I know. There may be still some holdouts, but it's hard to find the film and hard to find a place to develop it, and agencies know that.
00:34:14
Speaker
So that is starting to change too. But just like the digital photography or photography, as we call it, we can drop the word digital now because pretty much photography is all digital. And not only that, but nearly everyone has something in their pocket that can do light photogrammetry with a free app that can download from the app store. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I mean, that tool, that phone, you know, we've mentioned it before, but the way that that phone that sits in your pocket that you've got with you all the time has really
00:34:43
Speaker
consolidated and transformed so many of the things that we do. It made it so much easier. There's a saying with photographers, the best camera is the camera that you have on you. Don't obsess about having the best gear because if you have the best gear but it's sitting home, locked in a safe, it's not going to take a good picture at all because what
Digital Photography in Documentation
00:35:02
Speaker
you really need is that camera that you have on you when you see that perfect sunset or
00:35:06
Speaker
the once-in-a-lifetime event that happens. But the digital photography, that's huge for me. For me, probably more than anything else, that's transformed the way that I do my work. Because when I started in archaeology, it was still film. And I was brought on a number of projects as the photographer. And I would go out into the field with two SLRs.
00:35:28
Speaker
one that was loaded up with color slide film and one that was loaded up with black and white. The black and white would be for the publications and the color slide would be for the slideshows. So there wasn't the ability to print things in color. There wasn't the ability to distribute PDFs of your report in color on the web. None of that existed. One was a print format and the other was a slide carousel at a lecture format and that was it.
00:35:57
Speaker
Yeah. So the advent of digital photography has really changed the way that we do photography. And then like you said, on the phones, and that's opening up a lot of other things. I mean, we laid out, this is an excavation, not a survey, but we laid out a trench last season
00:36:16
Speaker
using the measuring app on my phone and the compass on my phone in order to lay it out. We refined it with tapes, but it got us really close. So that's a huge change in a lot of ways. The other big change, and I know you are itching to talk about this, that's how we record non-photographic or sometimes photographic data, and that would be tablets.
00:36:47
Speaker
Yeah. And, and not only that, but tablets is actually almost for me transitioned right back to phones for survey and tablets are more of an excavation tool because of the screen size and what you're doing on it. But to that point, it was tablets that came out a lot more, a lot more, I think a few steps ahead of the phone actually. Well, when like the first iPad came out as an example, I bought the first iPad when I was in grad school.
00:37:10
Speaker
April of 2010 when it was first released and, you know, spent all my money on it. And, you know, cause I was a poor grad student, but I bought it anyway and immediately started looking at ways I could use it for archeology. And I actually used it for data recording in our shallow geophysics course over the summer.
00:37:29
Speaker
it overheated many times because the Georgia, Athens, Georgian summer is no joke. So I'd have to put it in the, in the van and cool it down in the air conditioning or something like that. But you know, the GPR was overheating too, so I didn't feel too bad. But that being said,
00:37:44
Speaker
tablets have come a long way. And when we're out doing survey, we almost rarely actually bring a tablet anymore. We might have one that has like our maps and stuff on it. And maybe we're doing GIS on that tablet just because it's a bigger format. And that's the one connected to our sub meter GPS. But aside from that, all the recording and all the little things are just, they're happening on a smartphone because they're big enough. And it's like people are used to typing with their thumbs.
00:38:08
Speaker
And you could just do that really quickly. So I still see tablets as a really strong resource for excavation because you can, you can even take like an overview photograph and draw on top of that rather than freehand or using somebody else in a Plumbob, you know, those kinds of things. But you can, uh, uh, if you're still even drawing, you know, plan views and things like that. But you know, there's, there's a lot you can do and you got to use the right tool for the right job, but they've both come so far.
00:38:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's funny that you're mentioning tablets like that because maybe this is a point in this argument that I'm making that the higher tech stuff comes in via survey before it gets to excavation because all the excavations I've been involved in lately use paper still.
00:38:50
Speaker
It drives me crazy sometimes, but they have their systems and it works for them and they don't want to change it. They don't want to shake it up. Pretty much every survey that I've worked on recently is tablets with no paper component, with the exception of labels that go on bags or something.
00:39:06
Speaker
So that's interesting. Then also back where Intersect survey in particular is, and you just mentioned it, having the GIS on the tablet, that mobile GIS capability is groundbreaking. I mean, it's absolutely central to what I did with the Lagash survey, but I'm not the only one doing it. And I'm certainly not the only person to think about it. And that's because that's the other big technological change that happened
00:39:32
Speaker
since I started this is GPS, GNSS.
GPS and GIS in Modern Surveys
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. It's come so far and it's gotten so accurate on different devices. And not only that, but like the sub meter GPS that you can get have come so far down in price that they're pretty affordable for companies at most sizes.
00:39:52
Speaker
Yeah, and then even if you're not using it in that case, I guarantee you that everybody that's doing survey right now is using Google Maps or something very similar to find out where they're supposed to get the car to on the site, right? And so just that kind of really prosaic...
00:40:09
Speaker
integration of what used to be high-end technologies, GPS, this high-resolution screen on the cell phone, the turn-by-turn navigation, whatever it is. When you started, you were probably working off of paper maps, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and so you'd be given a paper map and told where the land was, you had to go survey, and somebody may have scrawled on to go through this gate.
00:40:36
Speaker
Or they'd written out directions by hand, you know, turn at the big tree, something like that, and now you can get your exact directions where you've got to go. And we don't think too much about it anymore because it's become so common.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yep. And that's totally true, man. It's changed so much just in the, you know, I've only been doing surveys since, uh, well, realistically about 2005, right? So about 17 years, but it's just so different from that early shovel testing back in, you know, Florida, South Carolina, and the, the information we were given and how we were expected to work. And
00:41:10
Speaker
like one person out there may have had the Trimble because they were $10,000. They're still not super cheap, but there's other ways. There wasn't even common for somebody to have just like a handheld GPS so they could keep themselves on track at a core scale. It's all changed so much. And we've got just a handful of more things to talk about here before we close out this show. But man, things are really advancing quickly, I think.
00:41:38
Speaker
The GPS one just floors me because when I first used it on my dissertation in 97, I had to borrow a fairly expensive one from my advisor.
00:41:48
Speaker
The grad student that was in charge of it wasn't thrilled with letting me use it, but he figured that they weren't using it at that time, so I might as well. And it was slow. It was one antenna. We still had selective availability, so it wasn't very accurate on its own. And then that accuracy was further degraded by the military, degrading the signal intentionally.
00:42:11
Speaker
So you'd set it out, you'd wait for a thing. But at least I had a real point that I could point to on the map. And then the next time out, I had a much faster one that had like, I don't know how many antennas, 12 maybe, you could track 12 satellites at a time, I think. And that was getting better. And now we have things that are sub centimeter, not in the handhelds consumer space, but the thing that you've got on your phone or on your GPS enabled tablet are really good anyhow.
00:42:41
Speaker
certainly better than what we used to have. And yeah, that's just been revolutionary to me too. Almost not quite as close as the digital photography has, but for me, a close second. And then with the tablets, because that's where I tend to interface with my GPS is now in the mobile GIS on my tablets. And that's just this confluence of all sorts of different things.
Future of Archaeology: Machine Learning
00:43:05
Speaker
Then I take that tablet or that phone that's helped me with the GPS and I mount it on the top of the controller and I fly my drone. Mm-hmm. There you go. Drink.
00:43:15
Speaker
I had to end up with that, right? Well, and I think just to wrap up here, I mean, obviously drones, we've been talking about those for at least a decade now, seriously in archaeology and probably earlier for some people. But what you can do with drones, what they're capable of, the different things that we're attaching to them and different sensors and stuff like that, it's just getting better and better. And then combining that technology and your digital photography and all the other keys and components to a survey,
00:43:45
Speaker
And applying that to what I think is probably the most cutting edge thing that we're doing today. And only a handful of people are really doing this in any meaningful way. But that's machine learning and using AI and machine learning to really start taking the guesswork out of things and the human bias and error that we can put in that we don't even know that we're doing.
00:44:03
Speaker
and really get some solid, strong answers. People might disagree with that, but I think when it's taught properly, because the key word to machine learning is learning, it has to learn correctly and understand what its inputs are in order to give good outputs. But I think it's...
00:44:19
Speaker
going to be the thing that really changes archaeology. And not only that, the world, to be honest with you, going forward. Yeah, I'm a little less convinced to you that it's going to move bias, but it is going to be a huge tool. In fact, with the magnetometry data from Lagash, we're starting to explore the opportunity to analyze it with machine learning. It seems like it would be a good project for somebody's master's paper in computer science, for example.
00:44:45
Speaker
So it's definitely something we're going to be pushing forward. And to wrap it back up, it's going to be something that helps us identify where and how and why we're going to do the surveys. And then at the tail end, it's going to help us with the analysis of the data that we produce, that we generate, that we collect. And back to your point about the learning, hopefully that gets fed right back in and it becomes a virtuous loop of
00:45:11
Speaker
better source data, better outputs, working their way back in as source data. Nice. All right. Well, with that, I think we will end this show. Again, if you want to continue the conversation with us and tell us how it's going in your area where you work or your country, then join us and our fellow members to the archaeology podcast and member and fans of the show over on our Slack team. And you can do that by joining us at either a monthly or annual rate.
00:45:37
Speaker
which is pretty affordable. When you look at all the other things that we're paying for out there, it's usually cheaper than like a venti latte from Starbucks every month. So think about that. And you can help us keep the lights on over here, our podnet.com forward slash members. And we'd really appreciate it. So with that, thanks a lot. And we'll see you next time. Bye.
00:46:00
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.
00:46:26
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo 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.