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Data Strategies on a CRM Project in Saudi Arabia - Ep 202
710 Plays1 year ago
Paul spent a couple months in Iraq on a CRM project. For a project of this scale and complexity, not to mention out of the country, there are a lot of pieces to consider. Paul takes through the tech they used on his last project and how it all fit together.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/202
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- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 202
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 202. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, who's finally back, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about all the tech that Paul's used in the last two months in Saudi Arabia.
Paul's Recent Tech Adventures in Saudi Arabia
00:00:19
Speaker
Let's get to it.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, long time, no podcast. How's it going? Yeah, no kidding. I'm doing pretty good. I feel bad. I mean, when I took off for this last trip, I thought that I was going to be able to record because, you know, we normally record on Thursday evenings, which is Friday, very early morning, late night when I'm in the Middle East. Yeah. And I can wake up, record for a couple hours and then go back to sleep. And I thought I was going to be able to do that. And out of two months, I got to do that once.
00:00:51
Speaker
So, you know, here I go, continue my track record of being the world's worst podcast co-host ever.
Fieldwork Reflections and Podcast Milestones
00:01:00
Speaker
But that was a fun recording, actually, that one that we did. Yeah, for sure. You know, you are, I wouldn't say the worst. Just one of.
00:01:10
Speaker
Just one of ya know it's exact opposite you're you're out there boots on the ground Gathering content. That's what you're doing. So, you know, it's it's great. I love it I I mean you're gathering a lot more content than I am to be honest with you. So there you get there you go
00:01:25
Speaker
Yeah, I got into this podcast way back when to keep myself one toe in the field in archaeology, and I'd always considered myself a field archaeologist, not necessarily a very good one, but one that is somebody who really enjoyed it. The way things have developed over the last few years, this has been not just a lifeline to keep me in the field, but now
00:01:44
Speaker
that I am back fully fledged in the field. It's great because I have these opportunities with you to reflect on what I'm doing and to talk to other people that are doing other interesting things. Then sometimes I can take some of the work I do and have side discussions with them about the work that they do. It's
00:02:02
Speaker
life's kind of serendipitous, right? You know, and so it's, uh, it's, it's worked its way back into my life in a really interesting way. And then because of the podcast, that's a big part of it. Well, that's awesome. And it's awesome to see how, I guess how things have progressed, you know, since you joined the show. And I don't know, did you have a chance to hear episode 200? I don't know how much chance you had to listen to podcasts.
00:02:23
Speaker
I didn't have a whole lot of chance to listen to that. I think I probably listened to that episode on my flight back home, but yes, I did listen to it. I always make it a point to listen to all our podcasts and to try to use it to improve and maybe slowly, itsy bitsy bits at a time I have, but that was fun.
00:02:41
Speaker
Well, they, yeah, exactly. For anybody that didn't hear that, it was a really fun one. And I'm only mentioning it because you're talking about, you know, when you joined the podcast and I had to look back at it, it was episode 61. So in the context of 202 episodes, which is what this recording is, that's a lot. I mean, you've been here for, I mean, obviously long, longer than any other co-hosts by far.
Collaborations and Archaeological Highlights in Saudi Arabia
00:03:01
Speaker
So that's amazing. I love it.
00:03:03
Speaker
Yeah. I wonder if that counts when you count the time that I'm not here. I mean, in that amount of episodes is still not very many times. So, you know, although it's been more in the last couple of years.
00:03:16
Speaker
Well, yeah, like I said, I'm back in the field, literally, and the field writ large, but I'm out of commission. Half of last year and a couple months already of this year. Well, along those lines then, let's talk about where you've been the last couple of months. We kind of led up to it before you left and just chatted about what you guys are going to be doing a little bit, but you were in Saudi Arabia. Tell us what brought you there.
00:03:41
Speaker
Right. Any long-term listeners will remember that I was in Saudi last summer as well. I was working for an American CRM company that was doing some work there. The company has more projects and has expanded their presence in the country. They brought me out again. This time, I was working on a series of different projects that the company I'm working for was hired by a group called the Royal Commission for Al-Ullah.
00:04:06
Speaker
which is Alola is a fantastic city in north of Medina. Like I mentioned on the last recording that I was actually on, there's a ton of archaeology in the area. There's the major site of Dedan, there's the site of Hegra, those are two of the things that if you don't know anything else about Saudi archaeology, you may have heard of one or both of those.
00:04:29
Speaker
So because this is contract archaeology, I'm not at liberty in the same way I am when I talk about the work that I do in Lagash, which is an academic project, at the same kind of liberty to talk exactly about what I'm doing.
Technology in Fieldwork: Tools and Challenges
00:04:41
Speaker
But I did a lot of interesting work with a lot of interesting people who are very good at the work that they did. And we used a bunch of tech, some of it old, some of it new to me, that I think we might have an episode here just talking about the different kinds of tech that I was using and some of the opinions and some of the experiences I formed from it.
00:04:58
Speaker
Nice. Well, I'm looking forward to that. We've got a whole bunch of things that you wrote down here that we can talk about, so it'll be interesting to talk about it. Hey, first, before we get there, you've got photogrammetry on the list here, and I just got to ask, did you see? Because we talked about this on the archaeology show that came out yesterday as we're recording this. I can't remember what episode number it was, but either way,
00:05:19
Speaker
We talked about the brand new scans that were released of the Titanic. Have you seen that? Oh, I saw, I didn't like dig into any of the news articles, but you know, on my newsfeed, I saw some of those and those are pretty spectacular and so, so eerie. Right? Yeah.
00:05:37
Speaker
It's really cool. You get a chance to take a closer look at it. What I really like is really what you can tell from that. And from an archaeological standpoint, it's interesting to note these things. Because sometimes we think of photogrammetry as just, well, I want to essentially grab this object and pull it into virtual space for measurements and other stuff like that. But you might be able to see things, especially something like this that's underwater, very murky. It's
00:05:59
Speaker
12,500 feet down underwater. There's literally no light down there unless you bring it, right? You can't see the whole thing all at once. You just can't light it that much. It's too big. But when you see it like this, the thing that struck me was how the bow plowed into the ground. I mean, it looks like a meteor crater with the dirt piled up around the bow. And it's still like that. It hasn't, you know, through ocean currents or whatever, it hasn't flattened itself back out or anything like that from that disturbance in over 100 years.
00:06:29
Speaker
It was amazing to me. And also the other thing is amazing to me is how intact the center section is probably not internally, but externally, the whole center section, you know, from where it busted off the stern and where the bow broke, but it's still kind of attached. It looks like you could float that to the surface and attach a bow on a stern and sail it off. It doesn't work too bad.
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's the photo that I was thinking of in particular, the front end, while the bow and the stern are totally destroyed, flattened practically, and the smokestacks are gone, but that middle section does look like, yeah, you could probably just go for a stroll up and down the hallways, probably not, but that's what it looks like from the outside.
00:07:10
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Could you imagine some higher technology years from now where somebody just turns that into a hotel at the bottom of the sea, that whole center section, just like, you know, that's a good down there.
00:07:22
Speaker
It is pretty much a graveyard, so there might be some regulation against that. Anyway, speaking of locating things, one of the first things on your list here is mobile GIS. Let's talk about that. Right. On my list of topics, things I could discuss today, I broke it down into data collection, data processing, and data storage. Most of what I do when I'm on a job like this, I'm a field tech, so I am primarily concerned with data collection.
00:07:51
Speaker
Mobile GIS, we've discussed plenty of times. I discussed and have written an article that's in review right now about using mobile GIS at Lagash for a surface survey, and we've used a whole bunch of different kinds. What we use on this project is we use a product called ICMT GIS.
00:08:08
Speaker
And yeah, this is a weird one. I definitely use ones that seem much more modern. This one, it does everything we need to, but it has a lot of things that as you use it, you learn not to do because it'll crash the program. It's really funny looking in that it looks like it's ported from Windows 95, and I think it probably was.
00:08:28
Speaker
I'm not being facetious. I really think it kind of was. There are a lot of things that you just can't do. Certain gestures that you're used to like on your iPad won't work. Copy and paste into the fields doesn't work. I'm not here to rag on this program in particular, though I happily will.
00:08:50
Speaker
What I did enjoy, and this is what I want to talk about more,
Mapping Techniques in Archaeology
00:08:53
Speaker
was I learned two things that really stuck out at me. One of them was with this one in particular, when you go to create a new feature, it pops up a box, asks you how you want to record it, what the layer is, and the terminology isn't always the same between different parts of the program.
00:09:11
Speaker
between features and layers and so on. That's a little confusing. It also gives you an ID that you can edit. What we found out last summer, if you edit that ID and you give it the same ID as an existing object, it crashes the entire program because that ID is an internal ID for the program itself. I was thinking about that just as a general point of programming
00:09:32
Speaker
And I realized this in writing my own total station software, you don't have to present everything to the end user, right? There's no need to present that internal ID to the end user. If they mess with it, they potentially mess with the data. There's no good reason for it. And that's the same thing I found with my own programming was I was doing things like my initial messages when you would save some data and said, yes, this point was successfully saved to the blah, blah, blah database backend.
00:09:57
Speaker
I'm like, well, no, who cares? The end user does not care what database, you know, that I'm using SQLite and that I saved it successfully to the SQLite database. What they care about is, yes, I saved the data. I literally need a check mark. That's all I need.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yes, that's all. It's saved. Go to you, right? Done. This is just more of a call than to programmers is realize who your target audience is. Even though when you're doing your programming, it's very tempting to give lots of detail. A lot of the times that detail is meaningless to the person who's actually using it, or in the case of what we saw with this ID, this internal ID on this program, is dangerous to the end user.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing that I really did like though is that we used it last summer and then again this summer for mapping, right? So you'd go and you could trace the outline of a site or you could trace the outline of features on sites or drop points on individual small features and so on. Part of our group
00:11:00
Speaker
was collecting with paper, and somewhere in the specs it said that they would provide RCU a paper sketch map of each site. And I thought, how silly that is that we could give them a very accurate map done in the GIS, save it to a screen cap.
00:11:20
Speaker
Save that to the camera roll on the iPad and then annotate it there and hand them, if it has to be on paper, print that out and hand them that. But then you'd have the advantages of both. You'd have the stuff that you really have a hard time doing in a GIS, indicating something that's off screen, like next site over is 200 meters that direction. Something like that that you would really easily do on a paper map that you're annotating by hand.
00:11:46
Speaker
But with those paper maps, you lose the accuracy. Things aren't in proportion. Things are a little off of where they actually are. North isn't necessarily exactly north. All those little things that irk me. So I was thinking that whether using this or any other thing, that you could actually combine those two kinds of modes of collecting data.
Photography in Fieldwork: iPads vs. DSLRs
00:12:08
Speaker
Well, okay, so when you said some of the team was collecting on paper, do you mean they were, were they, for the mapping, were they literally like compass and paste mapping? Or were they taking a print out of a GIS map and annotating it, like you said, or literally just sketching out the whole site? Literally just sketching out. They had paper forms that that way. I'm going to try to be nice. It was driving me kind of crazy, but because it was set in the specs to RCU,
00:12:36
Speaker
that we would give them paper sketch maps. It was taken to be literally paper from start to end. Wow. Yeah. And so I was, I was a little, I was a little bothered by that. That seems, seems a little, a little much. But I think that, you know, again, they're really,
00:12:53
Speaker
It does seem a little much, but again, they're very experienced archaeologists, they're very good at what they do. I think that I can present them next time I go back, which I may or may not do, but if I go back, I can present to them what I think is a smarter workflow that won't slow them down at all, still allows them to present something on paper to the client at the end, but then brings in the stuff that I care about accuracy and the data collection with the GIS.
00:13:20
Speaker
Well, I mean, don't get me wrong. I love compass and paste maps, sketch maps. I really had a good time making those when I used to do that. And I haven't done one in shit, probably eight years, eight or nine years. I mean, it's been a long time, maybe even 10 years, because it's been all, it's been all GIS, you know, from this point out. And when the BLM Nevada, I can't remember what it was when they actually stopped pretty much requiring those and you could just turn in a GIS sketch map.
00:13:45
Speaker
Then everybody started doing that, but composite paste maps are so fun to do. And even if you're not an artist, it allows you to kind of feel like an artist, so to speak. There is real value to it. And especially in the ways that you can annotate and the ways that you can indicate things like slope that are much harder to do if you're just doing a top down, very clinical dry sort of GIS tracing things map.
00:14:07
Speaker
So I think that there is room to grow there. And I think that this is one of the things I've really been enjoying about doing the field work is that in my mind, I have a notion of what might be the best, but when the rubber hits the road, in reality, you find that there are actually a few different bests and maybe there's a good way to combine them into making the super best. Okay then. So given the language in the scope of work, what we're using for photography?
00:14:37
Speaker
So we were using a combination. We were using iPads and we're using DSLRs. And what I've come to decide is that iPads or Android tablets, it doesn't have to be iPads, just that I've been using iPads exclusively for the last couple of years, iPad mini sixes.
00:14:54
Speaker
which I think are phenomenal. The cameras on these are not as good as a DSLR, but if you're carrying this piece of equipment, the tablet out into the field anyhow, and you've got a camera that is really, really good, might as well use it and prioritize that. I would still use DSLRs
00:15:13
Speaker
for certain sorts of things, right? So if I'm doing really carefully composed art photos, if I'm doing really carefully composed object photos, I definitely would use the DSLRs. I can control things like depth of field that I can't with a tablet or a phone camera.
00:15:28
Speaker
But for almost everything else, the iPads have it, and they have that built-in GPS, which is so helpful when it comes time to figure out what photograph was where. They'll even tell you which direction you were facing, and that's encoded there in the EXIF data. That's all so useful, so helpful that I think that it really trumps the perceived advantage of DSLR in most cases.
00:15:55
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I agree. And the photography off the mobile device is getting better and better. I'm actually rocking an iPhone 12 still, and the 15, I think, is coming out this September. We're going to transition at this time. The 13 wasn't enough for me to switch, and then the 14
00:16:13
Speaker
It was kind of an off year that there wasn't many advances either from that one. So I was like, we're going to wait. So it's the longest I've gone without switching out my iPhone, I think since the iPhone came out. But the point is, I think the last model or the one before that does have depth of field and other things that you can even do in post, right? So you can select on a different focal point and do some of that stuff. And it's just getting better and better and better. So I think the days of the DSLR are kind of numbered.
00:16:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, depth of field that my understanding is it's software, it's not really the... That's true. They do have multiple lenses, so there's a little bit that can be affected that way. But whenever I'm on a Zoom call, people comment on how good my image looks, not me, but... It is good.
00:16:57
Speaker
image and that's because I'm using a real camera with a real lens and I've got the aperture all the way wide open so the depth of field is really narrow just on you know the tip of my nose to the back of my head that that much movement and I'll go out of focus.
00:17:14
Speaker
It does make a difference. That versus the fake blur in the background, which just doesn't look quite as tasty. Yeah, indeed. But again, if you're bringing that iPad into the field and you're using it for your data collection, I'm really having a hard time at this point to understand why you would also need a DSLR. Yeah, good point.
00:17:36
Speaker
Well, we could go on this for a long time. We've had whole episodes on cameras before too. So, oh yeah. And I love, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, well, let's go ahead and take a break. Cause we got a lot more to talk about and we'll do that on the other side back in a minute. Hey everybody. Chris Webster here to talk about one of the latest supporters to the archeology podcast network, the Motley fool.
00:17:54
Speaker
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00:19:29
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 202 of the architect podcast.
Surveying Equipment: GNSS and Total Stations
00:19:32
Speaker
And we're talking about Paul's trip to Saudi Arabia for the last couple of months, where he's been doing some work over there and all the tech that he got to use while he was there. So let's switch over to GNSS. You, you mentioned that you were using a Leica GNSS receiver on this project. Let's hear about that. Yeah. So I don't have a whole lot to report on that. Any of us who've used GNSS receivers now, uh, with the corrections.
00:19:54
Speaker
There's differences in interface, there's certain differences in capabilities, but the Leica system we used was pretty good for us. I had two different projects I worked on that were in the same abandoned, well, started hundreds of years ago, abandoned in the 1980s village. And we laid down a few control points at one end of the village. And then later for a separate project, we laid down some more control points using that GNSS and everything matched up.
00:20:24
Speaker
which was really nice. So that was using Leica's own satellites which are in geosynchronous orbit around the... Are synchronous stationary? I can't remember now. They're in orbit around the equator. So it's reliant to a certain extent on having a clear view to the south, which is problematic sometimes in Saudi because it's so mountainous. And
00:20:49
Speaker
and lots of clips and things that will get in the way. But fortunately it didn't and we had these two different sets of surveying control points that we then based off our other points off of and everything lined up really nicely between them. And so that was just nice to see.
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, this kind of high precision GNSS with the corrections is ubiquitous now. There's so many different products that you can get that'll do the same thing. They all work very similarly and it's a great general purpose tool. Now, the reason why I'm leading off with that is that you know me, I'm a total station nerd.
00:21:27
Speaker
And what we matched up based off of those initial control points were points that we shot with total stations. So I was really in my element there. There you go. There you go. Again, we don't want to get into the specifics of the project, but just from a technical standpoint, I just kind of assumed you were doing survey and stuff out there. Were you guys doing excavations? Because what total station would imply yes. Yeah. So I was initially brought out to do landscape surveying survey, pedestrian survey, vehicle travel survey, whatever.
00:21:57
Speaker
But there are a bunch of ongoing projects. So I was doing some excavation. I was monitoring burial excavations. That village that we're talking about, we were monitoring the clearance of the buildings themselves and some of the
00:22:15
Speaker
so that they could be consolidated and reconstructed for tourism, basically. So the total stations, what they have and what I've been saying, we're not going to get rid of them anytime soon because what they have versus the GNS receivers is that they work when you don't have a clear view of the sky. Yes, you do have problems of visibility. You've got to be able to see that prism if you're going to shoot it.
00:22:40
Speaker
But we would lay our control points with the GNSS receivers and set up our total stations and lay all our sub datums from those and they work great. And I think that that's, for the foreseeable future, that's going to be what everybody's doing. And that is what everybody's doing. I'm not breaking any new ground here, but in concert,
00:22:58
Speaker
The total stations and GNSS receivers make such a good package, but you can't get rid of one or the other and still expect anything nearly the same quality. I mean, it's really the sum is more than, no, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Yeah. I mean, the total stations only as good as the point it's sitting in space, right? If that point's garbage, then it doesn't matter what else you recorded.
00:23:24
Speaker
Right. With that village, one of the things we had to do was, actually, also with the burials I was talking about, we had to do photogrammetry. We wanted the photogrammetry all to be very tightly spatially referenced to the world. Having that combination really helped. Another thing that was interesting, we were using a much older Leica Total Station.
00:23:45
Speaker
And a few things, like it had a laser plummet, which I always thought was kind of cool. I've never actually used one before. I've only ever used optical plummets. If you're setting up indoors, great. If you're setting up in the bright Saudi sun, forget it. You can't see that point at all.
00:24:02
Speaker
You may or may not be over the control point where it's all huddled around the tripod and try to get your hand right underneath the tripod where you can see the dot in the palm of your hand and try to slowly bring it all the way down to the ground to see if you can get to the point. This was actually a little triumph of mine.
00:24:26
Speaker
It records the data, saves it locally, but there was no way of exporting the data. What I found out was that this older Total Station has formatting files, and you can upload a formatting file that then you translate your data through on export. You say export this job, run it through this formatting file, and you get it out in whatever format.
00:24:47
Speaker
You tell it to do. I found some formatting files online and I tried to hack them and I ended up erasing some jobs. Unfortunately, old jobs didn't matter without actually successfully getting the data. In the end, I found the name of the program and it's a program that's been abandoned for like
00:25:07
Speaker
15 years that like I had once put out, it barely ran on Windows, just barely. And most of what I tried to do with it would crash. But fortunately, the part of this program that generated those formatting files still ran. So I got a formatting file output that I could then export all my data as a CSV.
00:25:28
Speaker
And then imported into GIS, imported into Metashape for our control points, for photogrammetry. And so that was a little triumph. And that was just me being my tenacious self when it comes to getting data off of equipment.
00:25:44
Speaker
by any means necessary. And that worked. So using the GNS receivers to get our really tightly controlled control points and then working off of that with the Total Station was really good. And then I also, because I got to play with the Total Station a lot, I trained a couple of my co-workers on how to use that one.
00:26:04
Speaker
and we came up with a plan for how to lay the hundreds of points that we'd need for the photogrammetry inside that village. It worked really well and it was a lot of fun. I got to put on my educator hat with that. They were great guys and really smart, really talented, but they didn't know that particular total station. Well, I didn't either, but at least I knew enough that I could
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah. Wing it. I think it's incredibly important. Anytime you have a total station on site, because I mean, to be honest, you just don't see them very often, right? Anytime you do have one on site, if somebody, hopefully somebody knows how to run it. I think I've told this story before, but hopefully somebody knows how to run it. But if you do, don't just hog the total station, right? It's fun. Once you get doing it, I mean, it can be tedious a little bit if you're doing it like all day, every day for weeks and weeks at a time, but bring other people in and teach them and spread that knowledge out. I'm really glad you did that. So.
00:26:55
Speaker
You end up having one on site and nobody knows how to use it. And that's what happened to me probably back in 2009, I think it was. It was right before I went to grad school and there was a total station on site. Literally nobody there knew how to use it. And come to find out, we were like two weeks into a full scale block excavation and hadn't taken any points.
00:27:13
Speaker
come to find out the project manager didn't know how to set up the total station. Like she'd had no idea, the field director, I guess she had no idea how to do it. So I was like, can I just take this home for the weekend? And I YouTubed and looked up manuals and cause I'd used it to total station before this was a Leica actually. And I'd used a top con before I'd never used a Leica. So I know I understood the basic principles of it, but I still had like no idea. And I, by the end of the weekend, I had mapped my parents like backyard and their deck and everything. Cause that's where we were staying.
00:27:39
Speaker
And then I became like the total station person for like the next month that we were there. So yeah, but it's, it's always nice to spread that knowledge out a little bit of any technology, really, you know, it's better. More people know it than less. So yeah. And the total station and you, you hinted right there is that the principles are exactly the same. Geometry does not change between that Leica and that TopCon. The Sakiya's trigonometry is exactly the same that the Nikon's trigonometry is, you know, how they.
00:28:09
Speaker
label things, how they name things, what menus you have to go through. That's what changes from one to another. And if you teach somebody the principles.
00:28:18
Speaker
that are going to apply to any total station, regardless of brand, then it just becomes a matter of figuring out how to negotiate the interface on that particular total station that you have on site. And so that's really what I like to focus on. Back at Lagash, there was a young man that was from the village that did some work for us around the house, but he also, he wanted to become an engineer. And so he saw me with the total station. He said, you're going to teach me how to use the total station. So I every day would spend a couple hours with him.
00:28:46
Speaker
showing them how to set it up and take points. He kept on saying, I want to learn the software. It doesn't matter. The program is going to be different on whatever they have on the thing. But if you understand these principles and you can set it up quickly and efficiently and consistently, you'll be fine. You'll learn the software that they have on that project that you're working on.
Laser Scanning and Photogrammetry
00:29:08
Speaker
So he took that seriously. And then a few weeks after I left the Iraq last winter, he sent me a text saying, hey, and it was a picture of himself wearing a white hard hat because he landed that engineering job that he wanted. And I was so, so proud for that. But, you know, okay, so a little bit of rag here, but mostly it's about
00:29:28
Speaker
the importance of teaching people this stuff. You became the total station guy, and I don't mind being the total station guy on a project, but having one person that gets tied up with that one piece of equipment, if you have a sick day, if for whatever reason, you leave the site early,
00:29:44
Speaker
everybody else is in trouble. It really helps every project to spread that knowledge around as widely as possible. And then it totally demystifies it. The only mysterious bit is how do I get through the Nokia's operating system because it's really kind of weird. And it's based off of decisions that were made 30 years ago and haven't changed even though the hardware platforms could take the changes. Yeah, it always goes back to
00:30:11
Speaker
one thing I've really taken from my time in the Navy because you're always looking at your next rank and your next advancement, right? And they don't say, don't do that, focus on that because it makes you just a better, whatever you do, it makes you better at that job by focusing on the next thing up because it's usually more advanced and there's more you have to learn. But the common concept was train your replacement.
00:30:32
Speaker
whatever you're doing, wherever you're at, train your replacement. And by training your replacement, you not only allow, well, the Navy in this case, the ability to promote you because somebody's going to slide into your spot, but then you're also learning more about what you want to know by training somebody else. You know, and it's just a, it's just a good thing. And I've, I've kind of done that with everything I've tried to do is train your replacement, you know, and, and don't, don't have a big ego over it thinking I'm the only one that should know how to do this. You know what I mean? There's always plenty of stuff to do.
00:31:01
Speaker
So, no, and, uh, you know, it's an old adage, but to, you know, if you really want to learn something, you teach it. And, uh, and that definitely applies for this. And then if you just make that your challenge, I'm going to learn this well enough to teach it and you start to teach it, then you find out that you learn more about it. And as you're teaching it, you know, invariably somebody's going to say, how come you didn't do it this way? Or why is that?
00:31:22
Speaker
And it might be because it was a blind spot and you just didn't think of it, or there might be some very valid reason why you didn't do it this way. And then you can use that to further enhance their understanding of it. So it's always fun. Exactly. All right. Well, before we go to our next break, let's talk about laser scanners. You've got that down here. You've got actually a number of like really advanced scanning techniques down here for this one project. It sounds like it's pretty impressive the amount of gear they took out there to do this, but let's talk about the laser scanners before we talk about the other stuff.
00:31:52
Speaker
Right. The laser scanners, this is something that I've seen and heard about for a long time and never got the chance to play with. I was lucky that on this village documentation project, that was one of the deliverables that was promised, was laser scans of the buildings. After they had been cleared out, we went back through. The laser scanner that we had was this handheld thing. You've seen laser scanners sometimes mounted on a tripod, a static thing.
00:32:19
Speaker
These ones are a handheld one that you could walk around and do the insides of rooms and do multiple rooms and they connect them all together. I didn't get the chance to play with the data processing, so I can't comment on that. I hope that I do get to before too long. But the data collection, it's not unlike using the Total Station or the GNSS receiver in that
00:32:41
Speaker
It's mostly, you know, what buttons you press at what time? What's the order of doing things? What are the best practices? And then you go. So the one that we use was Geoslam Zeb Horizon. And it says Zeb right on the side, which I thought was terribly unfortunate because that's mighty close to the Arabic word for penis. And I thought it was
00:33:03
Speaker
Maybe not appropriate for me to be walking around holding my Zev in my hand. I did use this for a number of years and apparently I was the first person to notice this so maybe that says something more about me than about anybody else or about the company name but anyhow it was great.
00:33:22
Speaker
it works for about 20 minutes at a run before it starts getting too hot. For this particular one, it's a few years old, that's really the limiting factors, the heat that it generates while it's catching all these points. It's handheld, looks like one of those guns that you use for packing tape and a sling bag that's got a battery and data collector on it connected by a wire to that handheld bit that has this spinning
00:33:49
Speaker
laser beam shooter outer thing on the end of it. That's the technical term. It takes tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of points, and then those get stitched back together into models. We did use again that GNSS receiver is a total station, I think just a GNSS receiver, to lay down some control points outside that we set up tripods over with a special kind of target. In this case, it was a Styrofoam ball.
00:34:16
Speaker
So after you're done scanning the room for the rooms, we did a dozen rooms or so in the 20 minutes, you head out to where you have those control points set up and you scan in those balls and then you know exactly where the other scans live in space because you've got three other points that are spatially referenced to correct those initial three. And so that was an interesting process and it was again fun because it was bringing in imaging techniques but also bringing in the surveying techniques that
00:34:46
Speaker
you know, are my lifeblood.
00:34:47
Speaker
Sure, absolutely. Yeah, it's not cheap though. That one that we had cost $40,000 plus. Oh my God. It may be a case of once you've spent that money, you look for any excuse to use that equipment, but I do see it being extremely useful for anybody that has to do things that are inside of places, inside of buildings, inside of caves in particular. I think that something like this would be incredibly helpful for full documentation of the site.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just looking on their website and some of the images they've got is, you know, just like demo images look very, very impressive. One of them is colored. It's like a building that has coloration to it. I would imagine that has to be added in post though, right? The thing is not actually.
00:35:32
Speaker
recording that information. It's just distance and plotting a plate map, I would assume. Right. Well, I've got some news for you. There's a digital camera connected to the front of this really this scanner thing that's taking a video the entire time. And somehow that gets merged into the, uh, into the final product again, because I didn't do any of the processing. I don't know how that's done. And I really hope to learn that, but, um, yeah.
00:35:56
Speaker
It brings in colors in some manner. It might just be coloring the individual points of the point cloud, or it might be using it to stitch together a texture map. I honestly don't know, but it's a tool. It's a tool that is going to be seen increasing use, I'm sure, over the next few years. Awesome. Well, that's pretty awesome. All right. Well, let's take our final break and come back and wrap up this tech discussion on the other side. Back in a minute.
00:36:21
Speaker
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00:36:49
Speaker
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00:37:19
Speaker
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00:37:39
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 202 of the Archiotech podcast. And we are wrapping up this discussion with Paul about his time the last couple of months in Saudi Arabia and all the fun tech stuff they got to use. And that's just because they have it. Well, sometimes it's because you have it, but also because it really maximizes your time out there and brings back
00:37:58
Speaker
the kind of data that you can really do something with without having to go back and back and back, something like that. It's not like doing archeology out here. Even here in Nevada, well, I'm in California, but anywhere around here, it's so big. You got to drive five hours if you forgot to do something, round trip just to go do something else. But how often can you fly back to Saudi Arabia and say, oh, we forgot to do this? So do as much as you can.
00:38:25
Speaker
And hopefully that's enough, right? Along those lines, photogrammetry, you guys were doing, you guys, I mean, along with laser scanning, you're also doing photogrammetry. So it almost seems like the photogrammetry is, I don't know, almost not necessary. If you're going to the laser scanning route, like what's the reason for doing both of them? Did you use them for different things?
00:38:44
Speaker
In the Village documentation, we use them for the same thing. But I also use photogrammetry with those burials, and we use it in other cases too. So they're complementary. I think that in some ways, it's kind of like taking photographs and drawing, right? Even though these are both fully digital techniques as opposed to photography and hand drawing.
00:39:06
Speaker
It just doesn't hurt to take that extra day. Not if it takes a whole lot of time either. I mean, the photogrammetry for a burial, I'd take a couple hundred photos, 150 maybe, and then spend, no, I don't know, maybe two hours max, absolute max processing the grave afterwards.
00:39:25
Speaker
You know, and a lot of that was me learning. I think it's really funny, actually. A couple of years ago, we had an episode talking about structure for motion. And to me, it was brand new at the time. And I'm, you know, I'm a little scared to listen to that episode again, because I'm sure I said a lot of really silly, naive stuff. And here I spent a lot of time working with Adjesop Metashape, processing photogrammetry, the stuff from the burials and the stuff from the village, and, you know, got to be pretty comfortable with it.
00:39:51
Speaker
Nice. I've used other photogrammetry programs too. I've got on my computer here, I've got WebODM, which I've used for drone mapping, and I've also used for building some models of, actually of a privy. Pretty exciting stuff. Yeah. And some testing and so on. But each program has its own strengths and weaknesses. Metashape, if anything, it's way, way, way too deep. Kind of in that thing of, I was saying earlier about what you need to show the user and what you don't need to show them.
00:40:21
Speaker
The terminology isn't always the same through things. It's a little funky, but I think that once you've settled on a particular workflow as being the best or at least the good enough-est, you run with that.
00:40:37
Speaker
And that's what we did. We tried a whole bunch of different things and then we figured out a way that we could really easily get our buildings aligned to the world and then bring in the other photos that didn't lie themselves perfectly the first few times. Get 90 plus percent of the photos to align and run through the processing to whatever point we had to get to.
00:40:58
Speaker
So, you know, that was fun. That was interesting. I definitely am much more experienced with it. I still have no idea what all the different settings in Metashape allow me to do, how they improve the final product, how they don't improve the final product, how they take extra time or make things go faster. No real knowledge of that. I just know that I had a workflow that was very consistent and it took me a bit of experimenting to get to that point.
00:41:25
Speaker
That was fun. It was interesting to actually feel like to get a deep dive into that in a way that I hadn't before. Part of that, and I'll touch on this a little bit, is that when we're taking those hundreds of photos, we couldn't upload all that. Our cell connection, our internet connection is through SIM cards, through Wi-Fi hotspots. Trying to upload gigs and gigs of data would just never work.
00:41:48
Speaker
So we were instead stuck with having to process things to a certain point locally, so that way somebody back home wanted to finish the processing for the report, for example. They didn't have to get those hundreds and hundreds of photographs. They could just get farther along down the road, step of the process, and hopefully that's a lot less data.
00:42:09
Speaker
So along those lines, I mean, you're talking about a lot of things that you guys were doing that is just generating like mountains and mountains of data. I mean, when you did have the ability to, you know, maybe send this off and, and upload it to the mothership, was that part of the data storage strategy? Or there was just like also mountains of hard drives out there where you were storing everything as well.
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah, so there are mountains of hard drives, which makes me kind of nervous. There are also a couple QNAP servers, an older one that they had decommissioned but still had online because they're afraid to fully decommission, which I've seen in companies and places before where you have some software or some piece of hardware that, I don't know, somebody might still be using it. It never gets turned offline and so they end up being zombies. We also had another QNAP server that we were actively using and that's where all our data went for the photogrammetry.
00:42:57
Speaker
as well as other things. A lot of the GIS went there. GIS data, shape files are particularly big, but the photos, especially those DSLR photos, yeah, a lot of that stuff would live locally. We didn't yet have a systematized way for uploading things to the mothership, and that's something that I really want to start thinking about, because this is going to directly affect me in Lagash, where we also generate mountains and mountains of data, and we also have a very bad internet connection.
Data Management and Storage Solutions
00:43:24
Speaker
So what I ended up doing actually is I was really impressed with using that local file server and having, I mean, it's very old school now, but having all our computers there in the office on ethernet talking to that same phone. Well, not all of them, just the ones that had the huge amounts of data, like the one that had to process the photogrammetry. The other ones could do it via wifi, no problem. But
00:43:48
Speaker
I've been bumping up against the storage space of my own projects and things I've been doing for myself and moving some things off of my computer onto hard drives using iCloud so I have access to things on the go, but it might not be loaded so I still need an internet connection to
00:44:07
Speaker
download them. I've been wrestling with this for a while. I also called it, right? So there's things that, you know, a part of a project and at a certain point I'm like, I don't need that anymore, you know, these antecedents to whatever I'm producing. But I decided that I wanted to try a different tack. So I got myself a server here too, at home, I just installed it.
00:44:28
Speaker
still configuring it today. The parts all arrived the other day. I was initially going to get a QNAP because of my good initial first experience. I was going to get a four drive one and then a RAID five. If I did four terabyte drives, I'd have 12 terabytes to work with. In the end, I went with a two drive Synology one, just like the looks of its software better.
00:44:54
Speaker
And so I got two eight terabyte drives and they're mirrored. So if one of them dies, the other one will continue going. And yeah, that gives me eight terabytes to play with. And that's well more than enough room for any of the projects I do. And then I can start to consolidate these disparate hard drives I've had onto this. I still have to come up with a good
00:45:15
Speaker
strategy for how I deal with this long-term. It makes me a little nervous that I don't have a cloud backup at the moment if I'm using this, but I'll cross that bridge. Anyhow, the whole point of this is that all that data that we're generating gave me a little experience in how to sync things back up to the mothership and made me think about how I manage my own data. I'm going to be using that
00:45:39
Speaker
To experiment with, it cost me a few hundred bucks, 650 roughly, for the Synology DS220 Plus and those two 8 terabyte drives. But I think that at the end of it, I'll have a much better sense of how an archaeological project can really manage
00:45:58
Speaker
that data, get the things that need to be put into shared server space on Dropbox or Box or Ignite or any Google Drive or whatever the project as a whole is using where multiple people can access them and how it can also have those antecedent data types. The photographs I use in photogrammetry, for example, live locally so they can be worked on quickly.
00:46:22
Speaker
but don't have to, in the end, be uploaded. That stuff, when you're done with it, can be archived, can be put on a couple hard drives, put in a couple places, and be done with.
Innovative Use of iPhone LiDAR
00:46:30
Speaker
So this is a work in progress. This is going to be an experiment, a long-term experiment. But putting my money where my mouth is here, and I want to see how this actually plays out. Nice. Nice. Cool. Well, a couple more things to talk about here. You mentioned iPhone LiDAR scanning, which came out on the iPhone a few years ago. But did you actually get to use it here, or were you just playing with your own iPhone out there?
00:46:53
Speaker
Well, that's funny because I was playing with my own iPhone. I also have an iPhone 12 Pro. I bought it just before the 13 came out. I mean like only before the 13 came out because my other phone died. I initially bought the 12, which I liked the color of better than the 12 Pro. The blue I thought was really nice. Got it home and realized it didn't have the lidar and so then took it back to the Apple store the next day and said, whoops, bought the wrong model.
00:47:19
Speaker
And I've played with the LiDAR in the past a few times. I downloaded a whole bunch of different programs and tested them out and they all had their strengths and weaknesses. I ended up calling it down to just one program called Polycam, one app called Polycam, which also exists for Android.
00:47:35
Speaker
And then continue to not use it because I didn't have any call for it. It was just a toy. Well, this time on the burials, I actually did scans of the burials. And you know, you said you forgot to do this. There are a couple of places I forgot to take measurements.
00:47:52
Speaker
Fortunately, the burials were all in the same area. The soils were exactly the same. The depth of the top layer was a little thicker in some places, a little thinner in others, but generally around 40 to 60 centimeters, and the maximum depth was 60 centimeters to just over a meter, depending on how far down we went in a particular trench. But I failed to take the proper measurements everywhere.
00:48:16
Speaker
So what I did is I went and I scanned. Well, I didn't know that failed to take them, but unfortunately I had scanned these burials beforehand. And this was what was absolutely amazing to me. I'm doing the photogrammetry with Metashape and it's making beautiful geo reference images, orthomosaics that I bring right into my GIS and overlay on the plan of the area. But with Polycam, I just go and
00:48:43
Speaker
spend maybe a minute scanning a burial, another minute, minute and a half as it processes, and suddenly I've got that 3D model right there on the phone. I can take measurements on that 3D model. I took certain measurements to see how accurate it was. I had certain things I measured in real world with tape, and I compared that against what I measured in the polycam model. They were the same. That meant that I could trust the depths that I forgot to take.
00:49:10
Speaker
And so as I was tightening up my notes last week, I relied on those Polycam models a lot. And you can really see that the detail isn't as good as what I was getting with Metashape, but it is really phenomenally good regardless. And that it takes just a few minutes. This is absolutely 100% going to be in my toolkit here on out. And I think I have to pay for the full version of the program so I can export my OBJ files.
00:49:40
Speaker
It just, you know, and share them with other people if they need to look at them. I can't see why one would not be using this. That's awesome. I just downloaded it actually. I can't believe I hadn't downloaded it before because I think you have talked about this when we first talked about LiDAR on the iPhones, but I just, again, I never really had a strictly good use case for it and I probably still don't, but it's kind of fun and I'm definitely going to play around with it.
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, somebody like you that mostly does survey, I don't know how helpful it would be on survey. Sure. There may be if you find some interesting feature, right? So I could see myself using it if I'm surveying in Arabia and I come across a somewhat unusual cairn, for example. I could definitely see myself scanning that cairn, just so I've got another record of it. It doesn't take very long. The detail is
00:50:31
Speaker
much better than what you expected. It allows you to spin things around and look at things and measure things. So again, forgot to do this. Whoops. I forgot to measure the diameter of that cairn. Well, no, I can just, you know, I could, my choices are either say it's about two and a half meters or I can measure and say, Oh yeah, it's two meters, 60.
Challenges and Discoveries in Saudi Arabia
00:50:48
Speaker
Nice. So wrapping this segment up, there's a lot of stuff on here that we've talked about, but I didn't see one mention of drones.
00:50:56
Speaker
Did you guys not have them out there or was it regulatory? What's going on there? It's regulatory. That's what I figured. They have them, they use them for a variety of projects. Some of the projects I was on, but they just did not use them and the phase that I was there. We'll see what else gets done, but it's regular tool in the toolkit to get some nice drone orthomosaics that you can then use in your GIS. You can use them for the planning, whether it's excavation or
00:51:25
Speaker
conservation or mitigation, whatever's going on, that drone imagery really helps. We just didn't generate any new drone imagery when I was there and that was regulatory. That was because they need specific permits for specific projects and those hadn't come through while I was in the field.
00:51:45
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I also sensed that our audience was getting thirsty. So I had to say it right here at the end. So thank you. Indeed. All right. So we just have a couple of minutes left and I see one last little bullet point down here that says bonus Ashley and hand access. Let's hear about that. Yeah.
00:52:01
Speaker
Okay, so this is where I'm going to get in trouble if I talk about this too much, but I'm going to say, holy cow, we found a Shulian Andaxes. Well, by we, I mean other people on the project. I was not on the survey at the time, but we found at least a half dozen. And then I went out there while we measured them in with the GNSS receivers. We have exact precise locations on them and helped with the photography of them in C2 and bagging them up and bringing
00:52:27
Speaker
them back into the lab so they can be studied. But this was around a relic lake bed, and it's phenomenal to find something that old, and so many of them. I mean, this is clearly a site around this old lake bed.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's gotta be pretty top of your list of some of the oldest things you've ever seen in the field, if not the oldest. I think that is the oldest. Hard to say though. Maybe around Lagash. No, nothing like that. Nothing that old. Nothing like that. No. No. Okay. Lagash would have been underwater, I believe, back then.
Copenhagen Conference and Future Plans
00:53:00
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose so. All right. Well, this has been great, Paul. It's glad to have you back. It's awesome to keep this going. Do you got any plans for the summer where you're going to be out, at least out of the country? Actually, I'm going to be out of the country later this week, actually tomorrow. So by the time you hear this, I'm probably out of the country. I'm going to Copenhagen for the Akana Conference. That's the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.
00:53:26
Speaker
We have a workshop there on the site of Lagash, so I'll be giving a little talk, and that'll be interesting. We'll see. Most of the most interesting talks are going to be before I arrive, of course, and then other ones I really want to go to, as is typical for conferences, conflict with each other, so I don't make the best out of it.
00:53:48
Speaker
Okay, cool. Well, again, we look forward to a lot more good podcasts this summer. And man, if we can get this going, we've failed for various technological reasons twice in a row. But I am really hoping that our episode after this is with Paul Martin, who was mentioned on the episode about doing the Louisiana archaeology just
00:54:09
Speaker
I mean, a few months ago and he was the one that brought out the, uh, the dogs that he used for, you know, finding some of the fun, some of the things they found there. So we just had some real logistical issues and we're going to try one more time to get this recorded. So I really hope we can bring that. Cause it sounds like it's going to be a, an interesting interview. So, all right. Well, with that, thanks everybody. We'll see you in a couple of weeks and thanks again, Paul. Thanks, Chris.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:54:32
Speaker
Take care.
00:54:38
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.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.
00:55:04
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.