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Maker Culture - Ep 163
249 Plays4 years ago
There’s a lot packed into this episode and there’s even stuff we didn’t get to but have in the links below. We do this in three sections: 3D Scanning and Printing, Robots and Drones, and Art, Experimentation, and Whimsy.
Links
- The Virtual Curation Laboratory
- Virtual Curation Lab on Instagram
- 3D Scanning and 3D Printing in Archaeology and Paleontology
- What can GIS+3D mean for landscape archaeology?
- 3D MURALE: a multimedia system for archaeology
- 3D Recording and Interpretation for Maritime Archaeology
- Robots help archaeologists to explore pre-Incan ruins in Peru
- Vine Robots
- Archaeology Robots will Explore Where No Human Can
- Revopoint POP 3D scanner
- TinkerCAD
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Zencastr Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 163. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about maker culture. That's all things 3D, robots, drones, and computers.
Hosts' Personal Updates
00:00:30
Speaker
Let's get to it.
00:00:32
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going? It is going all right. I'm still unemployed, which is a little jarring, but I am keeping myself very busy. I've been doing a lot of work for you with GIS stuff, which has been a lot of fun, actually. It was good to be able to step up into that role for a little bit here.
00:00:53
Speaker
And I'm keeping busy with stuff from the school that I used to work at, helping them with some programs. Something blew up. I'm like, oh, it blew up two years ago. I had a script that we could work around with that. So I had to train the new guy in on how to use this cheap heps.
00:01:09
Speaker
cheap hack script that I wrote. I'm keeping busy with a variety of different things. How are you doing, Chris? And where are you?
Choosing Podcast Topics
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, the eternal question, right? So we are currently in Coburg, Oregon, which nobody knows where that is, but it's right outside of Eugene, Oregon, which a lot of people know where that's at. One of the
00:01:28
Speaker
big maintenance facilities for our brand of RV. Now there's lots of RV technicians around, but one of the big factory maintenance facilities is right here in Coburg, Oregon. The other one is in Elkhart, Indiana, which is the home of motor homes in the United States. When you live in a space like this, there's always things that just build up, and we've had some things that weren't critical.
00:01:47
Speaker
But we're needed to be dealt with and we wanted the pros to do it and we just happened to be Coming down from Washington and I knew this was gonna be our schedule So I actually booked this appointment about two months ago because it's really different to yeah It's difficult to get in here and I knew we were gonna be coming through here around this time and then we're heading down to Reno for the Reno air races which I always work with my civil air patrol squadron and I
00:02:09
Speaker
then hopefully a little bit of vacation if all is still well. Our vacation is in South Lake Tahoe, which nearly burned down and was evacuated last week, but everybody's been let back in, so I think it's going to be
Maker Culture and Archaeology
00:02:20
Speaker
okay. It might be a little smoky, but we'll just stay in the house. It's a nice big house.
00:02:26
Speaker
I'll just be happy to not be having client meetings. To be honest, I don't care where I'm at. There you go. There you go. Today's topic, it's just called maker culture. Honestly, Paul and I have a
00:02:42
Speaker
we use Trello to organize everything. And we just have a board of episode ideas where things are just kind of scribbled down as they come to us that we may turn into future episode topics. And I was actually looking through it. We didn't have anything for today specifically planned out last week. So I was looking through stuff and I saw this one and I saw, Paul, I saw your quick
00:03:01
Speaker
thoughts on what this would be. And I kind of ran with it and set up some segments and started getting some links and taking some notes. We don't often have a ton of links for this podcast, but I've got like nine links in there right now. So a lot of good stuff to check out. Yeah, no, I was glad that when you first brought me on as a co-host on this podcast, I, uh, I, you gave me access to the Trello and I put a whole bunch of cards with just little, like one sentence, two sentence, you know, off the top of my head, what might be a good topic. And so maker culture,
00:03:31
Speaker
I didn't even know what I wanted to discuss about it, but at the time, STEM, steam, maker spaces, raspberry pies, all this stuff was really current. I was like, is this, you know, is this kind of, to me, exciting?
00:03:46
Speaker
subculture in the US, is this going to have any direct impact on archaeology? I put it in there, maybe we could explore it, maybe we could have a conversation about it, and then as you were going back through these, you came at me with, hey, hey, hey, which is exactly what I was initially intending. I just wanted to be a pretty open-ended discussion, maybe some good examples if we had any, but to see
00:04:10
Speaker
how these tools and techniques and programming languages and whatever else people are gravitating toward. And now it's a couple of years gone from when I first put that down and things have changed, but I think it's still a valid question to explore. Yeah. Been a couple of years. Trello records everything that you do in the activity log and I didn't think about it until you said you added this a while ago. You added this card on August 24th, 2017. That was almost exactly four years ago.
00:04:39
Speaker
That's crazy. Like I said, it was part of that initial big brain dump. I think I put about 20 cards in there just as stub ideas for future episodes. I did that because I don't know if you recall, but when you first had me on, you interviewed me and we had the interview actually as one of the episodes. I said that I for a number of years have been wanting to start a podcast with one of my old friends from my grad student days.
00:05:05
Speaker
And that never took off, but it did mean I had this whole list of different, you know, half baked ideas. And this was one of them, I
3D Scanning and Printing in Archaeology
00:05:15
Speaker
think.
00:05:15
Speaker
Nice. Well, I have got what the quick ideas that you put together. I kind of broke those up into three segments and segment one, we're going to talk about basically 3d scanning and printing segment two will be all about robots and drones. Take a drink. And, uh, for segment two, you might want to just go get the bottle. So you might want to dilute it with a lot of water.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah. Make sure you're not driving while you're listening to this episode. And then segment three is kind of a, we'll get to segment three, but, but Paul titled it. I titled it actually based on stuff, art experimentation and whimsy. So we will, we will dive into the recesses of Paul's mind for, for that one and what you were thinking on that. I see some good notes in here. I know. Right.
00:05:58
Speaker
Let's jump into 3D scanning and printing. Any time I think of 3D scanning and printing and who's doing stuff with this space, and it might just be because I follow him on Instagram. I've seen the person who runs this outfit many times at conferences. His name is Bernard.
00:06:16
Speaker
the virtual curation laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University. First off, their Instagram is fantastic because they put a lot of cool 3D printed things up there, but not only do they scan stuff in 3D and they get called out to scan things from clients essentially. They get hired out to do this stuff and then produce replicas. He's got a whole bunch of students that are there.
00:06:40
Speaker
working in the lab, and they sand down the artifacts, and then they primer it, and they paint it, and they try to make these things look a lot like as close as possible to the original artifact, and they just do such a good job. You scared me for a moment when you said they sand down the artifacts. I'm like, wait, what? Oops, not the actual replica artifacts.
00:07:03
Speaker
Oh, there we go. Okay. There you go. There we go. Yeah. And the other thing that I actually kind of recently discovered cause I've just followed him on socials is, uh, their website. I mean, it's a blog based website, but they've got like step-by-step instructions on how to do that on your own. They often put up blueprints for, if you want to 3d print something that they've already scanned, they'll put up the, uh, the print for it. And you can just download that and print it yourself. And then they'll give you step-by-step instructions on how to prepare it and paint it and, you know, finish it and make it look good. So.
00:07:32
Speaker
It's just a really well done outfit for not only getting something done, but using that opportunity to teach other people how to do it.
00:07:39
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a it's a great resource. I love projects like this. And we're seeing it more and more that they, you know, they're experimenting. I guess that gets into this maker culture. And then turning around and explaining what worked, what didn't work, how you can replicate things on your own. And a lot of the links that you chase down for this episode are in the same vein. So I think that that kind of gets to the heart of what I was thinking of when I was saying maker culture and culture is a terrible term for it, but it's floated around like that.
00:08:08
Speaker
that this experimentation and sharing of one's successes and failures that I think is cool.
00:08:15
Speaker
It is super cool. And for anybody kind of unaware of how 3D scanning works, because you have to typically scan something in three dimensions before you can print something in three dimensions. Because printing in three dimensions requires a distinct shape. And you can make shapes in different applications like Tinkercad. That's a free one. And there's a number of ones. I've used Tinkercad. And it's actually pretty easy to learn how to use Tinkercad. And then you can export that. Oh, yeah. We do it with kids at school.
00:08:44
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tinkercad is super fun. And they've got a lot of stuff that you can just kind of start with too and pull in and shapes and all kinds of stuff and learning how to add shapes together and adding one shape to another in order to like remove something, you know, the absence of something using a shape like like making a donut style sphere. You know, you create the sphere first and then put a rod through it and then make the rod a negative space and then just remove that from the spear, you know, something like that.
00:09:12
Speaker
But it's really cool. It's really neat. When we first got a 3D printer that we had use of at my co-working space a few years ago, I took the archaeology podcast network logo and brought it into Tinkercad and made it three dimensions and then printed up like a plastic coaster basically. That was the APN logo. It makes you think about certain things like
00:09:33
Speaker
And the APN logo, the letters aren't technically connected, right? If you just look at the logo, and you can't print like that. So I ended up printing something that was solid with the letters taken out of the solid. So holes where the letters are rather than the letters themselves. Otherwise, you've got to connect them in some way. And the logo just doesn't work out that way. But it makes you think about stuff like that. That's a fun exercise.
00:09:57
Speaker
When I first got my 3D printer last year, one of the things I did was I took this little design that I've turned into a sticker and I put everywhere for my personal branding and printed it out. I had the same thing. I made a coaster and the design itself is etched down into it. It's not actually etched because it's printed. It's just the negative space where it would be if it was carved out.
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah. It's funny, maybe that's a rite of passage when you get one of these 3D printers in your hands. Yeah, who knows, right? So 3D scanning and printing is becoming more of a useful tool. And I think when I think of it in the context of CRM and in the context of the type of archaeology that we do in the West, and Paul, you were on one of these projects with us over the summer. The way I think about this, and I'm curious at your take on this now that you were out there,
00:10:52
Speaker
Is there a comfortable way, do you think, anything you've seen? I know we're not 3D scanning aficionados here, but we've seen a few things. But I wonder if it would be feasible to take out into the field one of those handheld 3D scanners that's battery powered and scan the artifacts that we leave in place. If that would just take too much time or if that would be a thing that we could do.
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think it would depend really on the resolution of it. That's something I don't know. Those handheld scanners run into big bucks, $10,000 really quickly. Interesting that you would ask this though. The things that I was most interested in that I would most like to still be able to look at and turn around are things like we found certain can lids that were embossed.
00:11:39
Speaker
right? And we could barely see what the design was. But I know that if I knew what those cans were, I'd be able to figure it out in short order. Well, now they're still sitting on the back of a mountain in Nevada. But if I had a 3D scan, it was sufficiently detailed. I could play with that some, maybe do some RTI with it to try to figure out what that
00:11:59
Speaker
embossed design was. That would be cool. So that would be something that I would want to see, but it's entirely dependent on the resolution. But it's interesting that you would go this way because the RPA had a grant open for equipment for $1,000, 10 different single $1,000 grants. So I applied at the IAIS museum where I volunteer. Just got email yesterday that we didn't win the grant. So
00:12:27
Speaker
But I was looking into it because Paul Wechner was asking me to experiment with some photogrammetry because we have at the museum a whole lot of things from old excavations that were just deposited there and have never been properly analyzed, not so much as cataloged. I mean, it's on the paper that's on the box that's in storage.
00:12:51
Speaker
but it's from 78 or 77 or something like that. And so nobody has ever really looked at them. And because not everybody that would be working on these things can be co-located, he was like, well, if we could get sufficiently detailed 3D scans of these things quickly, we could then allow our researchers dispersed to take a look at them and at least do basic measurements.
00:13:15
Speaker
And so I looked into it and for the grant I had written up, we needed some more photography equipment because there isn't any really good photo setup and I wanted to do that because I love photography. But that only accounts for a couple hundred bucks, good backdrop and good lights. And I was looking at handheld scanners.
00:13:35
Speaker
And again, most of them are way expensive, $8,000 plus. But there is a certain class of these ones that are sub $1,000 now. And I looked at a whole bunch of them and saw different reviews. And I'm just going to put a link into it. I was hoping to get it to find out if it's any good at all. It's called the Revo Point Pop. And it's about a $550 handheld scanner.
00:13:56
Speaker
And I thought that that would work nicely, you know, put an object on a turntable, spend a few minutes and have it scan things. The examples I've seen both from the company and from other people's reviews of the product are really promising. So maybe we might be at the cusp. This particular one was interesting too, because the other ones were tied either to very expensive photogrammetry software or very proprietary stuff that only ran on Windows with, you know,
00:14:23
Speaker
a very good GPU. But this one had even applications to run on iOS. So you could connect the scanner to your iPhone and do that, recorded right there, which would then work in that case that you were suggesting going out into the field with these things.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah. Unfortunately, we didn't win the grant, and so I'm not going to be able to tell you if this product is really any good or not. But my phone, yo, you remember all the trouble I was having with my phone in the field, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it finally died, like dead, dead, dead. So as of today, I have an iPhone 12, which I know the 13s are coming out imminently. But so maybe I'll play with some of those LiDAR scanning apps on this to see what kind of detail I can get.
00:15:09
Speaker
But I'm wondering, with all the availability of 3D models that I see on places like Sketchfab, how are people doing those? Has everybody sprung for these expensive scanners? Or are they doing a lot of just structure for motion work and taking a zillion photographs? Or is it a combination? Or is there something that I just didn't look, didn't find while I was doing my research?
00:15:35
Speaker
Well, I personally think that a lot of the stuff that's getting done right now are getting done in an academic setting. And when you're in an academic setting, and you add a $20,000 scanner to your grant proposal, or the university's already got one for some other reason, I think a lot of the engineering department
00:15:54
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, and a lot of universities have, you know, really good like maker spaces and stuff like that, that have a lot of equipment like this these days. So I think we get a skewed impression of how easy it is to do this stuff because we see those people putting stuff out like that and we're like, Oh, that looks great. I want to do it. And you're like, Oh my God, it's going to be $20,000. So yeah. And then as we're wrapping up this segment here, one of the last things I was thinking about as far as field scanning goes is lighting is always an issue, right? If you're using photogrammetry,
00:16:24
Speaker
then you could probably put it on a background, twirl it around a few times, take some pictures, and the good lighting is actually an issue, a thing that you need. But in some cases, you might actually have to shade it or put it inside something where it can maybe spin with its own light internally or something like that, but then taking that into the field, I just don't think it's ready.
00:16:45
Speaker
So, let's go just a hair long on this because we've got some links to check out that we're not really going to get to talk about, but I'm going to leave them in the show notes anyway. But two other things that I thought were really interesting, some papers that we saw using GIS plus 3D scanning for landscape archeology. So landscape scale kind of stuff and really getting into immersing yourself and being able to
00:17:07
Speaker
manipulate the landscape in a way that a flat map just simply can't do. And that's pretty cool. And then the other one is immersive VR, of course. That's kind of like the dream and the gold standard is to be able to replicate and then walk into an environment that no longer exists, whether it's a prehistoric, ancient, or yesterday. I mean, who knows? But being able to recreate that and get into the archaeological site rather than just look at notes, a map, or a sketch map, or something like that.
00:17:37
Speaker
That's where it would be great to be. Anyway, some good articles about that stuff. Take a look at the show notes again. I'll structure them so you can find them by section and then take a look at those links. All right. Well, let's wrap up this segment and we'll give you just a couple of minutes here while we have some advertisements from just us probably. If you don't hear anything from any of our sponsors, then we have sponsor space open.
00:18:00
Speaker
They're dynamic, so I don't know what's going to be in there. But it depends on when you download this episode. But the next segment is robots and drones. So go get your supplies back in a minute. Chris Webster here for the Archeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Robots and Drones in Archaeology
00:19:32
Speaker
Welcome back to The Architect Podcast, episode 163. We are talking about all kinds of things in the maker and, I guess, experimental culture of archaeology, and really just the culture in general as it's applied to archaeology. This next one, I'm pretty excited about. Robots and drones.
00:19:53
Speaker
Drones we've talked about extensively on this show and They always come up in different spaces. So we're actually I mean by the notes I've got I don't think we're gonna spend like a ton of time on your standard drone applications because I kind of feel like everybody's talking about drones, but I do want to talk about robots and this first one well first off robots in the sense that they're not even necessarily autonomous, but there are things that are doing stuff that
00:20:22
Speaker
a human either can't or would be dangerous for a human to do. And I mean, in that sense, a drone is a robot. I mean, come on. I mean, realistically. Yeah, I can't fly. Yeah, exactly. I can't fly either. I can, but I can't stick to landing.
00:20:40
Speaker
So robots are cool in a lot of cases, because depending on what you're talking about, they're generally non-destructive because they can go into places without excavation, which we're going to talk about in a minute here. They can go where it's too dangerous for humans to go. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to go inside of a mineshaft or an attic because I just want to know what the network down there looks like, especially after it's been left to decay on its own. I think that would just be fascinating. What does a mineshaft look like after 100 years of just being left to its own devices?
00:21:09
Speaker
But there's no way a human could ever go in there. It's just too dangerous. Not only are there things that could fall on you or crush you, or you could step on an opening, another shaft if you're walking through it at it, which is more horizontal. You could be walking through that and then step on a vent shaft that was sealed over with wood or something like that, which is now decayed, and then fall 1,000 feet to your death.
00:21:33
Speaker
that would suck. And if none of that happens, more than likely the chemical outgassing that's in there is going to kill you either way. So it's just too dangerous to do.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yeah, no, robots, I mean, obviously, we've used robots in a lot of different ways for a long time in manufacturing, you know, since the 70s, at least. But where this intersects, where it comes into this whole maker culture idea is that, you know, starting with probably like, like a mind storms, but definitely accelerating with all these different like robot soccer games and whatnot. It's become accessible.
00:22:09
Speaker
that high school kids build robots as part of their school classes sometimes. They enter them in competitions, they learn how to have them do different tasks. Actually, why am I saying high school kids? I mean, I've seen grade school kids go to robot camp in the summer to learn how to program something to follow a line or to do whatever. And that's where I think this is exciting. And that's where the whole maker bit of it is it's the
00:22:34
Speaker
availability of all these different things that used to be high end and very expensive are suddenly coming within grasp. And that's where the excitement for me is with this, is that somebody that likes to tinker and likes to try to invent things, it's right there. You've got the tools in front of you. If you just have the time and the idea and the ability to procure these things, which isn't tens of thousands of dollars now, but
00:23:02
Speaker
in the range of tens or hundreds of dollars, you can do something new and cool. And so yeah, these robots, geez, a mineshaft. I didn't think of that though. Most of the examples I think of kind of a similar form factor. Do you remember when they were looking to use robots to go into the great pyramids of Giza? Yeah.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think they've done it in some cases, haven't they? I don't remember. I think that they were trying and they kept on having troubles. But I don't know how deep they could go. And I think part of that was restricted to the radio signals that they could get back out. I'm just talking off the top of my head here. So it's a vague memory. But it seems to me like if the robot isn't a big expensive thing, but something that you whip together,
00:23:43
Speaker
You send a bunch of them out. You try it. Well, honestly, even a tethered robot with a camera on it that if radio signal travel is your problem, then just tether the damn thing, right? As long as the tether is not going to get caught on anything. And I seem to have a picture in my head. It's either that or I've imagined it so many times it's real now. But I've got a picture in my head of seeing a wheeled little car-style robot with cameras and lights on it.
00:24:11
Speaker
going up like a narrow shaft in a pyramid. And I just, I don't know if that's really not, but I'm sure, I'm sure somebody's tried it and you don't need radio. Like I said, if, if it's, if it's something that you can get through and that totally leads to the thing that when I was researching for this section, my God, I came across this thing. You guys have got to check out the show notes because this Stanford, I'm just, I hope you watch these videos, Paul. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. They make me feel a little odd.
00:24:41
Speaker
Well, yeah, we'll leave it at that. Check out the video. But there's one article that says the title is Robots Help Archaeologists to Explore Pre-Inkin Ruins in Peru. And that led me to, because they had a link in there, Vine Robots. And I included a link to the vinerobots.org page in the show notes for this episode.
00:25:05
Speaker
What this is, it's a stationary device that you just set on the ground. I don't know how to explain this other than a sausage casing or a sock turned inside out. If your sock is turned inside out and you put your hand in it and you push it out,
00:25:23
Speaker
you're like, if you pull your socks off and they're inside out, you push it out as your hand goes through the middle of the sock, the rest of the end of the sock kind of comes out, right? So, and then it forms a sock. Well, imagine that for two, 300 feet and plastic, and this plastic thing has a camera on the end of it that's pushing along with it as it's basically inflating. I don't know if that's even the right word because they can put fluids and stuff in there too, but basically
00:25:49
Speaker
it's being fed material from the inside and developing sort of from the inside out. Like it looks like an intestine or something like that. It's just, it's really, really strange looking, but they're able to take this thing into really narrow passageways. They're able to, they said even from a search and rescue standpoint, they're able to like deliver things like water and stuff through that tube basically and air for somebody who is trapped in a, in a confined space. But, uh, these,
00:26:15
Speaker
researchers at Stanford used it to basically explore these spaces that way they would normally have to excavate and essentially destroy, because that's what excavation is, these Incan spaces in Peru. And it's just amazing what this thing can do and the applications that it has. I was totally floored by it. No, it's really cool. And again, this is where this intersects with Maker is that they give you instructions for how to build one yourself.
00:26:42
Speaker
Yeah, they're not complicated. And a basic one that extends out however many feet is pretty easy to make. So you could use that for checking what things are like in a crawl space. Home applications would be really obvious like what's inside a wall. Maybe inside a wall would be useful for historic archaeology. But then they also show how you can make it turn a corner. And the examples they give you for your own use, for your own making at home,
00:27:08
Speaker
involved putting pieces of tape on it so that one edge of this tube is effectively a little shorter than another edge, and you can make it bend as it inflates. But they also had examples, and I don't know how they do this. I wish I had the time to read some of their scholarly articles to find out what the mechanism is for this.
00:27:29
Speaker
But they have examples where they show it snaking around and basically under their control, go left here, go right there, go up here, down there, around this thing, through that hole, which I think they're targeting search and rescue. They're targeting medical applications, but that would be something great in any of the examples that we've used for going into an archaeological site without destroying anything. Going down that little hole to see
00:27:55
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So in Petra, we found under the temple, there was a really big sewage canal basically. And Petra, if you know anything about it, they're really obsessed with water control. And so it was surprising to find this right underneath this big temple, but also not surprising because they have every inch of land there.
00:28:17
Speaker
has some effect on how the water is collected and distributed. So they did GPR at the time, and this is in the mid-90s, in order to try to figure out what the drainage system was like under the temple. And we had some discussion of using robots to explore, but that never came to fruition. But this vine would be perfect for that. You just plop down in the middle of the temple, put the nose of the vine robot down into the hole that we found in the floor of the temple,
00:28:47
Speaker
And then, you know, with the camera on the end, let it go explore. See how far it goes. Where does this go? Is there a cistern under there? I don't know. But with that, we'd be able to find out pretty easily. Yeah. And it makes me think, too, that I mean, just on the demo videos from Vine, it looked like scale wasn't really in there in some of those, but it looked like it was about probably an inch and a half in diameter on the average. This tube that would that would be sticking out maybe two inches. But I think it was more closer between an inch and two inches.
00:29:17
Speaker
And it made me think, I mean, honestly, couldn't you just make one that was just a few millimeters across, to be honest? I mean, if you want the camera in there, that might be a problem, but I don't know. Maybe not with the cameras that they have for, you know, arthroscopic surgery. Sure. Yeah.
00:29:32
Speaker
So I don't know. And the camera and everything, you just got to see this video because the material, the camera, and if they're delivering anything, all of that is inside of this tube as it's being created and they're just feeding it all out. And you're right. The one thing that I really wish I knew more about was how they make it turn.
00:29:50
Speaker
at will. And the only thing I can honestly think of is it's in the camera mechanism. It's some sort of cable system that they can somehow guide and control and steer like you're sneaking a drain almost, you know what I mean? Like something along those lines where you can control that mechanism and it controls the direction the tube is going. But honestly, I have no idea. So that's pretty neat. Again, check out the show notes because that's some really cool stuff that they're doing over at Stanford and with those vine robots.
00:30:18
Speaker
When I think robots in archaeology, honestly, the first thing that comes to my mind is a classic example of underwater robots, so autonomous vehicles that either explore the bottom on their own or are floating through the air doing side scanning sonar and stuff like that, different things. But that also makes sense. We've had those for decades, to be honest, because people have been curious about what's under the ocean, and it's a very inhospitable place for humans. To say the least.
00:30:47
Speaker
Exactly. Now, historically, a lot of the spaces that we're talking about, like you're talking about Petra, down in Peru and other places like that, we've just dug it up. We've just gone through the work and spent 20 field seasons out there with students and just dug it up. And I think as stuff like this Vine robots gets going,
00:31:05
Speaker
that's actually going to start probably happening less and less. I mean, unless you're just digging in dense ground, that's one thing. But if you're dealing with structures and potential spaces, then this seems to be the best way to at least start and maybe guide your excavation in a more fruitful way. If you're just looking at
00:31:22
Speaker
empty chambers with no writing and nothing else that you can glean from that data other than the fact that it's a chamber or a passageway or something like that, then maybe we just leave it and then look at other spaces that might have some other potential data sources inside of it so we can learn more about it, which is the whole entire point of excavation to begin with.
00:31:39
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it definitely, whether it's a vine type robot or some other kind of autonomous or tethered vehicle, the fact that they're now easy enough and cheap enough to make, I think really opens up the doors for some non-destructive exploration. The same way that we use magnetometry or GPR to plan where we're going to excavate, use this like you were saying to
00:32:03
Speaker
pre-assess something, maybe get some primary data on it, but at the very least easily be able to explore some things that you weren't able to explore before without doing a full excavation with all the destruction that that involves. Yeah, indeed.
00:32:20
Speaker
So the last thing I want to mention on this from the research I did is the last link in this section and it's labeled archaeology robots will explore where no human can and it's incredibly poorly named because it's
00:32:35
Speaker
When I looked at this, I was like, okay, it's going to be another similar thing to the vine robots or whatever. It's very much not. You got to click on this because one of the things they talk about in here was that archaeologists don't understand exactly how
00:32:52
Speaker
how things are made in a lot of cases, like stone tools and stuff like that. And so one of the things that was actually discussed in here, and I looked at this and actually clicked a few links and dove a little deeper on it, was a robotic arm that was actually built for another purpose was used to simulate use wear on a projectile point. And they did like 1,000 strokes or something like that on a piece of fabric all in the same way. And the researcher that did it, he's like,
00:33:19
Speaker
I know humans would normally do it this way, but we have to look at stuff in a controlled environment and then look at variations on that, basically, is what he was saying. What he means by that is if you're trying to do use-wear analysis on something and see how something wears when you're scraping it or cutting with it or doing something like that, a stone tool,
00:33:39
Speaker
It helps to do all your strokes in exactly the same way so you can get kind of a baseline of what that's going to look like and then you can see the variation when you put the human element into it. But there's no good way to get a baseline of what a thousand use wear strokes of, you know,
00:33:57
Speaker
Scraping a height or something like that is going to look like with human hands. There's just no way to get a uniform example of what that's going to look like on a baseline. They use this robotic arm to basically simulate and do the same thing. I thought that was an incredibly insightful way to use a piece of technology like that that basically already exists. They just had to modify the end to hold a stone tool, basically.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, that basically exists. I know I've said it a few times now, but that to me is where this is all exciting. Taking something that already exists that somebody developed for an entirely different purpose and seeing what you can do with it. Does it have a good archaeological use? I would not have thought of using a mechanical arm for that, but I'm glad somebody did.
00:34:40
Speaker
I know, right? All right. Well, there's a lot of cool things in this space. Type in robots in archaeology in Google, and you'll have a fun time at it. There's a lot of really good things being written and a lot of people doing really out of the box thinking on this stuff, which is exactly what we need. Some of it might fail. And I hope they write about that too, because we have to know where not to go. We have to know what directions not to take, and in addition to the directions to take.
Art and Technology in Maker Culture
00:35:05
Speaker
So both of those are equally important.
00:35:08
Speaker
All right, well, we are going to go on to segment three and see what Paul means by art experimentation and whimsy back in a minute. You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt sticker or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arc pod net dot com slash shop for a link. That's arc pod net dot com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:35:38
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to The Architect Podcast, episode number 163. Today we're talking about maker culture and weather and how and in what ways it impacts archaeology. And as Chris said, I put down a whole bunch of different ideas and he kind of categorized them a little bit here. And he lumped these ones together as art experimentation and whimsy.
00:35:59
Speaker
And what I was thinking when I first put that down, when I first put those words down was at the time, 2017, when I wrote this card up, makerspaces were popping up all over the place. And they tended to attract people that were both engineering minded and
00:36:14
Speaker
programming minded and technically minded, but also very artistic, right? So there were a lot of things that were created in these maker spaces that were around them or by people who were starting them that didn't necessarily even have a functional purpose, but they were exploring what you could do with different things. And some of them were just, you know, exciting to see on their own, right? But then other things you could stop and think kind of like that mechanical arm that you were mentioning, oh, wait,
00:36:38
Speaker
I could use this in a totally different way that might be useful for something that I else that I want to do. And so, you know, makerspaces, there's one, this Danbury hackerspace a few miles away from where I am in Danbury, Connecticut. In Philadelphia, one of my old friends, Evan Malone, founded NextFab Studio.
00:36:56
Speaker
Oh, actually, his partner is Joe Weber, who is of my cohort in grad school, the only other person with the same advisor that year as me. And so she worked in the Middle East. He used to go there every now and then with her to do things like fly kites to take pictures. And I think he built some robots. Anyhow, he's an engineering whiz himself. Is the Reno Collective where you've worked so much? Is that also a makerspace or is that more of a co-working space?
00:37:23
Speaker
It's primarily a co-working space, but there are a handful of things. They've tried to create a maker space within there for Reno Collective members. They've only got a couple of things. I mean, it's a good start. They only have a few things though, but it's pretty cool.
00:37:40
Speaker
It's hard for me to actually grasp exactly, but I love it. This intersection between engineering and computer science and such, which if you do these things, you realize that there are actually highly creative processes.
00:37:56
Speaker
But it's only been in the last few years that people have been really bridging that gap effortlessly, that this notion of the stuffy engineer and the totally flighty artist as being two completely incompatible personality types is kind of eroding. A lot of the better engineers I know, certainly a lot of the better computer programmers I know are flighty artists.
00:38:23
Speaker
And a lot of the flighty artists I know spend a lot of time building robots and other things that fit into the whole maker world. And so I just wanted to, for no particular aim here, I was just like, how do these things enable us as archaeologists, these tools, these techniques, these maker spaces, whatever, how do they enable us to actually explore what might be possible?
00:38:50
Speaker
right? Outside of academia, outside of contract archaeology, but in ways that are going to go right back into it. And so, it's like just odd ideas. I see online, like on Instagram and Twitter, there are a number of archaeologists that do things like they take photogrammetry of, well, there's one that does hill forts.
00:39:11
Speaker
And then for no real research purpose, he'll post these pictures or these fly arounds of the, and they're beautiful and people comment on them because aesthetically it's really pleasing. And I think that that's a really kind of cool way to make archaeology accessible to people.
00:39:29
Speaker
Yeah. To just appeal to their sense of beauty, strangeness, innovation, whatever. Again, I don't even know where I'm going with this idea other than I feel like there's something there that will allow us to play, to be a little more playful about what we do.
00:39:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that is the real takeaway from a lot of what we've been able to talk about is the people that are doing these things are in turn talking about it, right? They're not just writing a paper. They are putting out, you know, YouTube videos. They have Instagram, you know, all kinds of stuff like your from the hill forts and then the virtual curation laboratory we talked about in segment one. They are putting this stuff out in a way that is accessible to anyone. And it's just, uh,
00:40:17
Speaker
It's a really great way to share the science that you're doing and not only that, but get other people excited about it and make them think that, Hey, this might be something that I can do or that I should look into for my research project or for my CRM project or whatever I'm doing. You know, can this be a thing?
Small Computers in Archaeological Fieldwork
00:40:33
Speaker
I think that's how drones got to where they're at, right? Not only that, but they came way down in price, but people were just really talking about them and, and, you know, promoting them. And then they started coming down in price at the same time, but that's all hand in hand, right? The more people that start using it,
00:40:47
Speaker
the more companies that are getting into that space and the more competition there is and competition drives prices down. It's better for everybody to share that information, share what you're doing and just get it out there. Not to mention the public archeology aspect of the whole thing. That's just good too.
00:41:04
Speaker
Anyway, one of the other things that I put on one of those Trello cards was a discussion of small computers and such and whether they're going to be using the field much. I don't even know that I have enough to flesh out a full episode on that, but I'm going to bring it up now. And I'm bringing it up because
00:41:20
Speaker
In case you hadn't guessed by the way I talk about these things that interests me, I like tinkering and programming and designing and inventing, and I'm not good at any of them, but I like it nonetheless. And so on my desk right in front of me as we speak, I've got two different things here. I've got, well, a whole lot in a little box right next to me, but on the desk, I've got a Raspberry Pi that I'm experimenting with as being a kind of field computer.
00:41:48
Speaker
very low power. I've mentioned before about programming projects I've been working on for Total Stations. This is going to be the platform for it. I have one working and I've just been going through different prototypes. Raspberry Pi is probably the biggest of these SBCs, these single board computers. There are other ones, Beagleboards. Everybody seems to be putting one out. Orange Pi, I think I have an Orange Pi down in a box here.
00:42:12
Speaker
Eric Olson, I gave him one of my old, he's been on our podcast a couple of times, I gave him one of my old Raspberry Pis. I seem to accumulate these, but I always have this feeling like they're going to be useful in the field. One of the ideas I've got is that it'd be wonderful when things settle down in Yemen a bit and I've got a little more contract archeology work under my belt
00:42:32
Speaker
and have a better sense of the public duty aspect of that. To take a bunch of raspberry pies, go back to say, you and Yemen and talk to the folks I know at the museum there to see if we can set up like a class with local kids to learn some programming and also infuse that with some history and archaeology in their local area.
00:42:53
Speaker
you know, maybe some database work, you know, how much I love databases and let them keep these things afterwards. And then the other one, and this I think really might have a lot of uses, I've got a microcontroller, a Raspberry Pi Pico. And it's basically, you've probably heard of Arduinos. There's a whole bunch of different ones, Teensies and so on. And these are extremely low power. They're not even full computers like the Raspberry Pis are.
00:43:17
Speaker
They're more sensors that you can program. You get this little $4 or $5 board, get some power on it, and then put a different kind of environment sensors, movement sensors, cameras, data loggers, whatever. I'm experimenting with this one.
00:43:34
Speaker
I just want a temperature sensor to build. Now I could go out and buy one for less than it's going to take for me to put this together, but this one is going to be just exactly how I want, built by me. And in a case that I'm going to 3D print and at the end I'll say, hey, I made that.
00:43:52
Speaker
I've thought of once I got that project under my belt, I might make a whole bunch of these for my wife to log light in different parts of our backyard for her garden. Through the course of the day, through a course of a whole growing season, what parts of the yard get more light than others and what times of the day and does that affect them how we do?
00:44:13
Speaker
But I'm thinking these sorts of things, because they're so accessible now, would be very useful for monitoring environmental data on a site. If you have a site that might be prone to looting, you have a camera hooked up to one, what else?
00:44:30
Speaker
for keeping track of the state of historic structures. If you have something that you think is settling, some of these on sensors that you would then be able to check where they are in relation to each other, they use such little battery power. You put them on a long lasting battery and just set them up in certain places and check on them every couple of months and pull the logs from them to find out what's moved.
00:44:55
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Well, that is a lot. And you know, I'm not into hardly any of that stuff right now, which I really am sad about. I feel like my current situation prevents me from even getting into it a little bit right now too, because I mean, you need some parts, you got to store some stuff, but not really then, right? Because if you just pick one thing like raspberry pie to get one,
00:45:16
Speaker
learn how to program it, learn how to hook other stuff to it and use it. I think that would be really fun. And it's not just a fun thing to do, but also as you're experimenting and playing with it, like you said, you start to realize, well, what else could I do with this? What else could I attach to this thing? I was thinking in the robot section,
00:45:32
Speaker
man, it's come down to, for probably less than a hundred bucks, you could buy all the parts in the little electric motors and all the stuff to build yourself a little four wheeled, probably robot. And even if it's not something that can be controlled wirelessly through radio signals, but even that is probably super cheap these days, you could build yourself a little thing that could go somewhere and do some stuff. And you just learn through doing that. And I wish more
00:45:58
Speaker
Well, definitely university programs, but companies as well would allow a little bit more time in the schedule for that kind of creativity. It seems like it's always just go, go, go, go, go. And there's never a chance to really step back and say, where can we push the limits in this area? Where can we push the limits in that area? And what are the possibilities? And just have a
00:46:19
Speaker
have an afternoon of creative, there's no wrong suggestion type of discussion and trying things out. I think, man, that would be so awesome, but I don't know, companies never have the, they'd seem to never have the time for that, but I feel like if they made the time for that kind of thing, that'll be incredibly beneficial later on.
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the nice things at the school was that we were allowed that space to experiment with things that would maybe help the school. The problem was we were so busy keeping everything running that we didn't actually have that time. So I had this stored up enthusiasm for playing with things and tinkering. And now that I'm unemployed, I actually have a little bit of time that I've been able to get into these again. It's fun. So I said, yeah, I'm unemployed. At some point, it's going to hit the wall.
00:47:23
Speaker
There's so many different, you know, experimental archaeology is a well-known and well-respected part of our field, and people have been doing it in various methods
Historical Processes and Experimental Archaeology
00:47:31
Speaker
for quite a while. Who over on the Life in Ruins podcast was doing a lot of shooting arrows into carcasses?
00:47:31
Speaker
But until then, I'm going to learn a little bit and I'm going to build a little bit and it's going to be a lot of fun.
00:47:42
Speaker
David on the Ethnostynology channel that he's got on Instagram and TikTok and stuff, he's got some great videos and YouTube about doing some stuff like that. He was firing a bow and arrow from a moving truck at targets in one of his videos. That was impressive.
00:48:02
Speaker
A few years back, I got into home brewing because apparently I need to have every hobby under the sun. But I got into it specifically because beer is so important to ancient Mesopotamia.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah. And there's a whole debate which came first, beer or bread and whatnot. And I was like, you know, not only do I drink enough beer, but I like it. And the thought of the process of it, you know, this kind of weird chemistry, biology, something happening was really exciting. So I got into it just to find out what the process was. And, you know,
00:48:34
Speaker
I'm no good at it, obviously, because I try too many things. I'm no good at any of them. But then I was thinking about that. I was like, well, homebrewing, because a lot of the same sort of people who are attracted to the makerspaces and whatnot are also, you know, all at the same homebrew forum.
00:48:49
Speaker
And it circles right back around. There are Raspberry Pi monitors and computers that you can do to monitor and keep track of your brew process. Or actually, some fully control it from grinding all the way through to actually brewing the beer.
00:49:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think what you're getting at here, and when you mentioned applications for experimental archaeology and all this stuff, and like I mentioned earlier, try something and if you fail at it, that's okay. You still learn something in the process, right? Because what we're doing, you know, the applications for experimental archaeology are all the other things you can possibly think of.
00:49:27
Speaker
right? Because we're trying to like, maybe you're, you're tinkering around and you see something about, uh, you see something on discovery channel about a mechanical arm that can do this. And you're like, Hey, wait a minute. I'm trying to replicate use wear analysis on stone tools. Could I use that arm to do that? It's, it's about staying aware, looking at other technologies, keeping your eyes open and, and trying other stuff and figuring out what it's going to be. I think the VR space obviously is going to blow our experimental archeology up. If we can ever get into,
00:49:54
Speaker
you know, really kind of tactile, haptic feedback, that kind of thing. We're going to be able to do whatever we want, basically. Stuff that is completely unrealistic to do today, like throw a spear into a wooly mammoth. Like, how does that work? You know, let's get the dimensions down and see how many people it takes to take this thing down, because we can't do that right now.
00:50:13
Speaker
You know, we could try on an elephant, but we'd probably all go to jail. So it's not going to work, but stuff like that is, is unreplicatable in, in real space. And so we're going to need VR space to do stuff like that. And I'm sure some of that's being modeled in computers, which is basically VR, but still, you know, I think it comes down to.
00:50:33
Speaker
Listing to shows like this, not to toot our own horn, but you know, we covered a lot of different things in this episode and that's the whole point. There's a lot of cool things going on out there and we only scratched the surface. I mean, we didn't really get into it. We were high level on this stuff, but there's people really getting into the weeds on these things and you really just need to keep your eyes open on that stuff. So that's my takeaway.
00:50:53
Speaker
No, I like that takeaway. Yeah. You know, I'm jazzed. I'm going to get back to my program projects that are right. It's just we're done recording. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, hey, feel free to write us, Chris, at archaeology, podcast, network.com, Paul at Lugol dot com, our contact info's in the show notes and hit us up on the socials if you want to let us know what you're doing. And, you know, maybe we'll even bring you on for an episode if you've got a project that you're in the middle of or, or you did something and it failed and didn't work. We want to hear about that too.
00:51:23
Speaker
Come on and tell us what your methodology was. And so others can maybe go down a slightly different path, go down a completely different path. Who knows? It would be awesome to hear about all those experiences. So again, hit us up. And yeah, listen to our back episodes because we talk about a lot of this stuff in depth on other episodes, especially drones. There's one last drink for you.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:51:47
Speaker
All right. Thanks, everybody. And we will see you next time. Take care.
00:51:57
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at 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.
00:52:22
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in 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.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:52:45
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 archpodnet.com slash members for more info.