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Map It! - Ep 188
371 Plays3 years ago
Today Paul talks about this magnetometry training that he recently received. They’re using it on the project in the Middle-East that he’s been going on the past few seasons. Then, we discuss a recent publication that combined many forms of data into a single, usable, geodatabase.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https:www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/188
Links
- Archaeo-Physics, LLC
- Paul’s Transect Calculator script
- Map It! The Pueblo Grande Village Mapping Project
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Support
00:00:00
Speaker
While you're listening, go to archepodnet.com slash members and support our efforts. Let's get to the show. You're listening to the Archeology Podcast Network. Hello
Episode Introduction and Topics
00:00:15
Speaker
and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 188. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss Paul's magnetometry training that he took recently and a new geodatabase project at a site in Phoenix. Let's get to it.
00:00:31
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the architect podcast, everybody. Paul, how's it going? Aside from being stressed and harried and busy, actually pretty good.
00:00:41
Speaker
How are you doing, Chris? Pretty much the same way.
Reno Air Races Incident
00:00:45
Speaker
Anybody who is a long time lister of any of my podcasts know that I've probably mentioned the Reno air races before, which is the one volunteering event. Just once or twice. I know, right? It's the one volunteering event that I do every year with my civil air patrol squadron. This is my 10th year doing it, actually. And again, this isn't really a technology thing, but this article played all over the West Coast, but there was actually a fatality in the second to last race at the air races this year.
00:01:09
Speaker
year. It's kind of interesting to talk about just briefly. There was a guy who was 61 years old. It was during the jet race. So he had the speed record for the event of 512 miles per hour on the course. And yeah. And luckily this happened at the far backside of the course where there's no spectators. There was a pile on judges and stuff, but none of them were hurt.
00:01:29
Speaker
He was neck and neck with this other guy who during one of the heat races, there was like a photo finish across the finish line. I can't remember which one of them won, but so he was really in competition and it's a six lap race. And if you cut a pylon, you get a two second penalty times the number of laps. So you get a 12 second penalty if you cut the inside of a pylon, which would have effectively ended his race. Right.
00:01:51
Speaker
And he was just, he got rookie of the year last year. He's a big time business owner, big kind of ego on him. And he's just like, I can't lose this race. I need to win this race just to, you know, whatever. So he made a huge rookie mistake of he pulled up before the pylon and then turned right and cut across the other guy's path right behind him in order to not cut the pylon. And then he made a sharp, aggressive maneuver back to the left.
00:02:16
Speaker
doing 500 miles per hour and instantly lost consciousness. That's what they think anyway. It's called G-lock, gravity induced loss of consciousness. That's what that means. And when he went into G-lock, you could see the plane in a hard left turn, a knife edge left turn, and then it kind of settles down. It didn't settle down into a straightened level.
00:02:35
Speaker
it just was no longer turning hard to the left, but it was still knife edge, you know, with the wing down and it just slowly, well, I wouldn't say slowly at 500 miles per hour, it, it approached the ground under control and then turned into a fireball. So it was, uh, yeah, it was pretty crazy just looking at that and the circumstances around that. And
00:02:55
Speaker
That's why when you're doing, you know, dangerous things, that's why we have safety training. That's why we do emergency training and stuff like that. And he just didn't have the experience really to know, hey, this aggressive maneuver is going to get me back on track, but I could pass out while doing it, you know, and it was just.
00:03:11
Speaker
It was just one of those things, you know, and it might've been at the, if he'd have pulled just a little bit less, he wouldn't have passed out, but maybe just like grayed out a little bit and then realize, but realistically he should have pulled up and out and just take, taken the loss and then, you know, been alive to race again. So, so that was a tragic, but exciting end to the, to the Reno air races, unfortunately. And now we're.
00:03:33
Speaker
up at Lake Tahoe for the week and headed to the East Coast in our RV. Oh, and we bought a new RV. So there's all that that we're dealing with. Instead of upgrading every single system on our RV like I dream of every single day, we bought one that's already upgraded in every system. So now I don't have to upgrade for at least another two months, I won't be thinking about.
00:03:55
Speaker
As soon as you settle into the new one and find everything that kind of rubs you a little the wrong way, it could be done better. Right. It's going to be tough with this one though. It's got so many cool things on it. All the things that I've wanted, you know, and it's just, yeah, you're right though. There's going to be something eventually, but right now that's tough to see. Tough to see.
00:04:15
Speaker
Speaking of upgrades, you upgraded your skill level a little bit in the last couple of weeks. Tell
Magnetometry Training Experience
00:04:20
Speaker
us what you did. Yeah. So last week I flew out to Minnesota to spend a couple of days with Jeffrey Jones of Archeophysics to learn a bit about magnetometry. I haven't done magnetometry before, but I'm going to be in charge of doing a magnetometry survey at Lagash this fall. I mean, I'm heading out in a week.
00:04:40
Speaker
So yeah, but the line I'm going to or first and then to lag ash and once once I get out to lag ash in about a month's time, we're going to be you know, amongst other things doing the magnetometry survey. And so archaeophysics had the same
00:04:55
Speaker
type of system, slightly older than what we're getting, but basically the same from Census. It's a cart-based system and we wanted to get me up to speed to make sure that there weren't certain problems with how I was going to plan doing the survey. It's not rocket science. Well, actually the...
00:05:14
Speaker
The science of it probably is rocket science, but doing the survey itself isn't necessarily. But how to lay out a grid, how to run the transects, what to do if there's an obstacle, all that we did. And that was basically reaffirming things that I've done before. The particulars of the software that we were using, how to stop a transect and break a field up into small chunks so you could do smaller rectangles within it.
00:05:42
Speaker
to stitch them back together to make up the entire thing because you've got an obstacle of some sort. And then the other stuff that was actually really fun and this was absolutely invaluable was that after we would do some recording and we went to a, we were in Minneapolis, we went to a cemetery in Minneapolis and did a 50 by 50 in a small corner of the cemetery. Afterwards, we'd go and sit down and download the data and look at it and
00:06:11
Speaker
Because Jeffrey is so experienced and has been doing this for so long, we had lots of interesting discussions about what he would see, what the highs and lows meant, the various intensities, how to get better contrast so that you could see what
00:06:29
Speaker
what you want to see, a lot about the interpretation of what the results were. He's worked all over the world, so he had some understanding of the kinds of architecture, which is what we're going to be looking for primarily at Lagash, what that architecture would look like, how burned surfaces and collapses and kilns and all these sorts of things would show up differently in that magnetometry data.
00:06:55
Speaker
So for me, that was where the real value was, wasn't necessarily in learning how to use the equipment, because I think that I could have figured that out with what I've done in the past, but it was the interpretation and then not just the interpretation, but the science behind the interpretation, because you're basically looking at, if you start to think of everything as a magnet,
00:07:14
Speaker
you're looking at the North and South Poles and the fields around them. And that was for me, a novel way of going about it. It makes total sense. But I didn't think about that beforehand. And now
Understanding Magnetometry
00:07:26
Speaker
I have a little bit of an understanding.
00:07:28
Speaker
Well, and that leads me to a question too, just to kind of back up a little bit for anyone who may not fully understand what magnetometry is, because when you hear the word, you might think, well, I can only find things that have iron in them, you know, things that are metal-based or something like that. But can you give just a really quick primer based on your current knowledge of what kinds of things you can find with magnetometry and kind of how it's used?
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that it's fair to say that you're basically looking for contrasts, right? And so if you have something iron buried in the ground, it's going to be much higher contrast because it's much more magnetically active. Well, active isn't necessarily the right term, but
00:08:10
Speaker
It's going to show up a lot more than the surrounding soil matrix. But that's not the only kinds of things. Like you said, it doesn't just have to be iron. It can be other things. Certain other metals aren't necessarily going to show up, but he had a lot of discussion about lighten strikes.
00:08:28
Speaker
And he finds those quite frequently. And that's something I never would have thought of, but they do when the lightning strikes the soil, it gets somewhat magnetized. It's not a really strong magnetic, but it's enough that the magnetometry will pick it up. Another thing that we discussed was burning, right? Because we have a lot of kilns at Lagash. And so when
00:08:52
Speaker
that clay that's lining the kiln gets heated up and then cools some of the crystals aligned with the Earth's magnetic field, essentially then giving it a magnetic north and south in the, you know, like a magnet, like a bar magnet in what you're looking at. And then the highs and the lows show up as blacks and whites respectively in the magnetometry data in the color ramp that he likes to use. And you can use that for understanding
00:09:20
Speaker
that it's different, but also you can use it for understanding what kinds of events may have happened that would cause that. And so the strength of the high versus the strength of the low might tell you something that if it's something that was burned in situ, like a kiln, or if it's maybe a bunch of something that was burned and tossed into an abandoned room, it's going to show up differently. Both of them are going to show up in magnetometry.
00:09:48
Speaker
but they're going to show up with a different kind of signature. I'm just a neophyte at this, but having these discussions with him about the work that we had just done was absolutely invaluable for me. I look forward to analyzing what we do in Lagash. I look forward to working with him again in the future, analyzing what I did and hopefully that the data collection that I'm going to be doing is going to be sufficiently detailed and spatially controlled well.
00:10:17
Speaker
that he can analyze and discuss with us what he's seeing, and we can use that to help interpret what's going on in the site beneath the surface.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's really cool. And one of the things you made me think of with the lightning strikes, because I've seen these before in Georgia, actually. When I was in grad school there at University of Georgia, I did a shallow geophysics course where we did basically all the popular shallow geophysics methods, including magnetometry, resistivity, GPR, all that stuff. And there's a cemetery on campus that we actually used as
00:10:50
Speaker
At the time, it was being used as a testing area for the class, so there was a kind of a big, older cemetery, and each semester of the shallow geophysics class, which I think only played every two or three semesters, would do just a little bit more mapping in the cemetery.
00:11:06
Speaker
Because we take the whole semester to just do a little portion of it. Because we take one grid square, basically. I can't remember how big it was. But we take one area. And we do GPR over one weekend. And then we do magnetometry. And then we do resistivity. And during the week, we would go back and talk about the results and stuff like that. But with the lightning thing, we did find some of those. And those kind of fossilized tubes of fused soil that lightning can create are called fulgurites. And I always love those. Those are really cool.
00:11:33
Speaker
I don't know, they look like if you've ever seen somebody excavate a termite mound under the ground, it kind of looks like that a little bit, but that's super cool. And also, just a note too, one of the things I thought was really neat, when we're looking at this older cemetery that had, these were burials that were anywhere from 100 to 150 plus years old in this cemetery, so it was a pretty old cemetery.
00:11:55
Speaker
Some of the iron hinges and buckles and stuff on caskets, they're not really around anymore in that acidic soil, but the iron is still there. The iron doesn't break down in that. The iron's still there. It just diffuses into these weird patterns that are just in the soil now and these experts in this kind of stuff that have seen that kind of thing before. It's almost like they can look at that and their brain just reconstructs it back into
00:12:20
Speaker
what it was because they know what they're looking at. Yeah. They can see it, which is super cool. Yeah. It's like, uh, you know, it's like the radiographer at the, at the hospital that can look at the X-ray and interpret a lot about it that when you without the training look at it is like, well, it looks like a head.
00:12:37
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Actually, I want to... You said grid square, and I wanted to bring up one other thing that developed out of this training, was on the flight home, I decided that I wanted to plot out... I decided I wanted to make a little program so I could mark on the baseline and
00:12:58
Speaker
its pair at the north on any given square. If I could take a cart, tell it how many sensors, what the width was, I could then predict how many transects I would have to run and which direction they'd go and what the center line of the cart would be. So that way I can take a rope and I can flag it really quickly and then just reuse that rope so I can reuse the same thing. So that probably wasn't clearly explained. I would have to show you. So I wrote a quick little script and I found out something that
00:13:26
Speaker
It wasn't immediately obvious until I did this. I said that we used a 50 by 50 meter grid when we were working. We had a one meter wide cart with five sensors on it. And so we'd go up, turn around, come back. And so starting in the southwest corner, working northward. So from the baseline to its pair 50 meters north, turn around and come back 50 meters, turn around, go back up. So zigzagging across like that.
00:13:53
Speaker
and then he flagged where the center line of the cart would be, and I would just aim toward the center line on each one. The cart that we're going to be using in Lagash is the same one meter wide cart, but we only have three sensors. So instead of a 25 centimeter spacing like what we used in my training, we're going to have a 50 centimeter spacing between any of those sensors. No problem. But I wrote this script and
00:14:19
Speaker
The math wasn't working. I was missing a transect. I was missing the 49 and a half meter reading. And I couldn't figure this out. I was convinced that it was a logic error in my code. And so I looked at this for a couple of hours just bashing around different things until I realized that what I hadn't expected was that the width of the grid square
00:14:46
Speaker
So 50 meters is evenly divisible by five for those five sensors that we were using, but it's not evenly divisible by the three sensors that I will be using. So for Lagash, I had to modify what we're doing. I'm going to either do a 45 meter by 45 meter grid or a 60 meter by 60 meter grid, because both those are evenly divisible by three.
00:15:12
Speaker
Both those are evenly divisible by five, and we tend to in archaeology think in five meter increments oftentimes for a survey, right? You do a five by five, you do a 10 by 10, you do a 20 by 20, whatever. Those are all divisible by five. It's not something that if you're using a five grid array, you would know a five sensor array you would notice, but in our case with three sensor array on our cart,
00:15:34
Speaker
I have to adjust a little bit and I wouldn't have noticed that without writing the script. So I'm actually going to put the script up on my GitHub page. It's nothing fancy, but I think it might be useful to somebody else to avoid making the assumption like I had that I could do a 50 by 50 only to find out when I start measuring things out that I'm missing one stripe of my transect.
00:15:57
Speaker
Jeez. Yeah. Well, that's math for you. At least you're not launching a rocket and getting the units wrong. Yeah, that's never happened. Or accidentally crashing into the surface of Mars.
00:16:11
Speaker
Exactly. That was in feet and inches, not in meters. Whoops. Like, how do you make that mistake? Seriously, I don't like all the people that have to check it anyway. We're we're digressing. All right. Well, that is super
Pueblo Grande Mapping Project
00:16:25
Speaker
cool. I look forward to seeing how this actually goes when you guys get out there, when you get back. So I'm sure we will definitely have an episode about that. In the meantime, let's take a break and come back and talk about the primary topic for this show, the Pueblo Grande Village Mapping Project back in a minute.
00:16:44
Speaker
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00:17:06
Speaker
Thank you.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:18:06
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 188 of the Archiotech podcast and we are getting into our primary topic now and that is an article in the September 2022 issue of the SAA's archaeological record. It's kind of an online magazine and
00:18:20
Speaker
The article is entitled Map It, the Pueblo Grande Village Mapping Project, and the authors listed are Douglas Mitchell, Laureen Montero, Zachary Rothwell, Stephanie Sherwood, and Steven Roscana. We'll link to it in the show notes. I don't know if you have to have an SAA account. Actually, Paul, you sent me this link to the whole magazine, to this whole episode, or sorry, issue, and I didn't have to log in to see it, so I think it might just be open. Right, I think it's open on free access.
00:18:49
Speaker
Unfortunately, you can't download individual articles. You'd basically either use the link that we'll have in the show notes to view the entire thing in a magazine style in your browser, or you can PDF download the entire issue. So take a look at that. This is a relatively short article, but it's pretty cool. And I do have to note, just in case we hear it, again, we heard it a little bit last time, but the big bad wolf is currently trying to blow Paul's house down. So he might just
00:19:15
Speaker
I didn't know. So that that's the sound you may hear in the background if I can't eliminate all of it. So anyway, Paul, you found this and now this is called the mapping project, but realistically it's a database project. Exactly.
00:19:33
Speaker
They're not necessarily mapping anything. I mean, they are right now. They're mapping new stuff all the time probably. But this is an effort in its overall sense to basically take 100 plus years of data and figure out a schema in a way to bring all of this data and scalable for future data, essentially into one geodatabase.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah. And you're pointing out that it's mapping, but it's a database. If you look at the authors and who they're associated with, most of them are GIS specialists. And so I think that may have been what caught my eye. I mean, certainly having map it exclamation as the title caught my eye initially, but it, you know, it tickles those things that always interest me. It's mapping, it's databases, it's GIS. It's the stuff that always, you know, interests me professionally as an archeologist.
00:20:23
Speaker
But I also think that we all have contact with in one way or another. So I think that there's something here I'd hoped when I looked at it, I think it does have a little something for everybody in terms of ideas, if not necessarily in terms of concrete approaches to things.
00:20:41
Speaker
Right, and to give just a little bit of background for those of you that are not currently looking at the article and are, you know, serving a transect or driving a car or something like that, this site, the Pueblo Grande Village, essentially, is a Hohokam site located essentially right in the middle of Phoenix. It's in the Phoenix metropolitan area. And I'm a little sad that when I was in Phoenix earlier this year, I didn't actually know about this and go see it. I think we're going to be passing through Phoenix again.
00:21:06
Speaker
shortly, maybe in a couple of weeks or near there somewhere. So hopefully if we go through there, I might go see it because it sounds pretty cool. But this is a settlement. Again, it's, it's ho-ho-come now, so to speak, but it's a settlement that began around 8,600 and it's the ancestral place. It's an ancestral place to the, I'm going to get this wrong, the Oudum people. And it includes a platform mound, a ball cart, possibly two ball courts, a tower like structure and thousands and thousands of prehistoric features. So that's essentially
00:21:34
Speaker
what it is. And I thought what was cool is one of the first images in this article is a watercolor map put together by Adolf Bandelier in 1883 of the primary platform mount. And I'm like, why don't we do maps of watercolor anymore? That just sounds cool.
00:21:53
Speaker
I mean, it's beautiful. And you see that in a lot of archaeological reports. It's very visually stunning, attractive, if not necessarily always the most accurate. And I don't know if this one is particularly accurate or not, but there is something kind of visceral you get when you look at some of these older maps and artist renditions of sites.
00:22:11
Speaker
Well, and back when I say back when, you know, we used to do sketch maps all the time. I don't really do sketch maps anymore, like composite based sketch maps. It's all GIS. But, you know, back just 70 years ago, when that would be done at every single site, I had a friend who was my first dig partner. He was in my wedding. He's just he's been my friend for a really long time. And one of the first people I met on my very first archaeology project. And he told me a while back that kind of a
00:22:38
Speaker
kind of a signature of all archeologists, how you do your North arrow if the company doesn't have a standard. And I've always thought about that. And I just noticed, I didn't notice this on the first read, but his North arrow, Bandolier's North arrow is like an arrow that goes all the way through the site. Like the tail feathers are on the left side of the image. And then the North arrow is like, it's an arrow piercing the site. And that is clever. I like that.
00:23:03
Speaker
It's got a little shadow, too, if you know what it does. Yeah, it's very artistic. This whole thing is really cool. So I wonder if it was originally black and white. I mean, you can do a watercolor in grayscale, of course, but in the article here, it's essentially a grayscale image. I wonder if it was originally grayscale or if he had some color to it.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah, no idea. I've been on projects where we have an illustrator that their job is to do technical illustrations of the site or of pottery or whatever. But invariably, they're all artists. And some of their artist renderings that they do, sketches and watercolors and whatnot of things they see at or around the site are
00:23:44
Speaker
are really interesting. I think that that's a kind of enrichment that could go back into reports, not necessarily as primary documentation, but for visual interest. That little thing that you just pointed out about that arrow, it's cute, it's funny, it's a little quirky, but it works.
00:24:04
Speaker
And it doesn't dilute from the rest of the drawing. So bringing in a little kind of more whimsical or touchy-feely human sorts of things into our otherwise dry reports, I think is a good thing.
00:24:19
Speaker
Yeah. And that's why I like that they put that in here too, just to illustrate one of the things that they were, that they were trying to catalog with this, with this geodatabase. But then another figure four in here is an artist rendition, which I can't imagine this is in the geodatabase. I mean, how would they put it in, but they just put it in here as an artist rendition of the platform mound. And it's an artist rendition of the platform mound in full usage, probably a thousand years ago or less, but it's really cool to see that too, in an article like this.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's the kind of rendition that you'd see in a National Geographic about an ancient site. For sure. People working, cooking, cleaning, sleeping, whatever, all over the place and a nice oblique view of the site and gorgeous landscape in the background. It's meant to be evocative.
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah, even like wall repair and or construction. It's really cool. All the different activities going on here. So again, setting the stage a little bit. As we mentioned, the Pueblo Grande Village Mapping Project. I don't know why they didn't go bigger and go for the Pueblo Venti Village Mapping Project. Sorry, that was a terrible joke. I was just a Starbucks.
00:25:26
Speaker
But anyway, as I said, it's a geodatabase project continuing the efforts of Bandelier from over a hundred years ago. And again, they wanted to create this, and this is kind of the cool part of this. They wanted to create this as a way to not only catalog everything that's been done to date, but all the ongoing research and then any future research. And that's where the
00:25:46
Speaker
the real struggle comes in is trying to figure out a schema. They call that data schema that not only aligns with the museum's goals, because this is a museum now in Phoenix, but I think it was made a museum. I didn't take this note, but somewhere around like 1929 or something. So for a long time, it's been a museum that people could go and look at.
00:26:04
Speaker
But they wanted to be able to align with the museum's goals of what they want to do in the future. So give
Geodatabase Development Goals
00:26:10
Speaker
them a database that they could query and use and create maps from and do different things from in certain circumstances. But also future data that's collected would easily be able to fit into this geodatabase. So I'm sure, Paul, with your Lagash project and other things you're doing, this is really speaking your language. Yeah, I mean, dealing with multiple databases is
00:26:32
Speaker
really data sets rather, not even databases. I mean, this goes back so long with the projects here that it's not just a matter of converting one person's database to another, which itself is a huge project or can be a huge project, but it's bringing things in that we're never really thought of as structured data and how they're going about that. So they're looking at it from a database centric approach, which is how I probably would do it too.
00:26:57
Speaker
and they show us a couple of their tables and a little bit of their naming schema, and then they're adapting existing spatial data.
00:27:08
Speaker
intent of, like you said, using it for research and for cataloging internally within the museum. But then they also mentioned that they want it so that it can integrate outward to the City of Phoenix's GIS if they need to, which is a really complex task. Any step of this is a really complex task. And so I don't know how successful they're being with it. I do know though from having worked with different
00:27:31
Speaker
databases, that that can be an extremely challenging thing. And it makes me happy that they're actually trying, right? Because sometimes you look at disparate data sets and you just go, this is just too much work. I mean, I'm working on a little project here in New York where I'm helping somebody that I work for, a CRM company. He's trying to make the data
00:27:55
Speaker
that he collected on a small excavation project look like the data that are from another project from, I believe, about 30 years ago. And even that, even though he controls his own data set end to end, trying to make it look like this other data set, because that's what the historical society is expecting as the deliverable, that's a lot of work. And what they're trying to do on this project is orders of magnitude more difficult than that.
00:28:23
Speaker
So, yeah, kudos to them for trying, and I wish them all the best. But, wow, when I hear the description in the article of the kinds of challenges that they're having with it, it doesn't surprise me that they are bringing in database and GIS specialists to try to get a handle on this. Yeah, for sure, for sure. All right, let's take a break real quick, and we'll come back and wrap up this discussion on this mapping slash geodatabase article. Back in a minute.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:29:57
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 188. And we are talking about an article from the September 2022 issue of the SA Archaeological Record called Map It! The Pueblo Grande Village Mapping Project. So check that article out in the show notes or rather the entire issue because that's how it sits.
00:30:14
Speaker
So we talked a little bit about the setting behind this, and now we're kind of getting into the database a little bit. And I wanted to mention something they mentioned in the article about the growth and expansion potential of this database. Because if you're creating a database just to, I guess, catalog everything that's been done, you're kind of thinking a little short-sighted in that, hey, there's probably going to be future research done, especially on a place like this. Now, it could be if you're creating a database for a
00:30:40
Speaker
for a single project, you don't necessarily have to think about growth, but you probably always should, right? Just in case somebody comes back to that and wants to add to it or something like that. But the five components that they mentioned that they were really trying to fit in this geodatabase and the growth and expansion of these projects are somewhat ongoing. Some of them are A, projects within the park, so there's lots of stuff always going on within the Pueblo Grande Park.
00:31:04
Speaker
The SR 143 project, which is a highway construction project there. The Sun America project, which I don't know what that is, but they just mentioned it and they don't really say what it is. And then projects conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and then projects conducted since 2007. So I'm guessing there were some data standard users in the park during those first couple decades. Well, first couple decades mentioned the 90s and 2000s. And then after 2007, there was probably some other methodology that was used or standard, and they're trying to fit all this into the same database.
00:31:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And actually back to reference of what I was just talking about with that project that I'm helping on, we have access to the database, the access database, in fact, that the previous data set that was handed over to the Historical Society was generated. And I can see, by the way, it's put together that initially it was done very concisely, very smart. The layout of the tables relations between them makes a lot of sense to me.
00:32:01
Speaker
But I can also see that over the course of 10 or 15 years, however long it was being used, it accreted all sorts of different tables for specific needs. So I'm guessing that that 2007, there must have been a reset.
00:32:14
Speaker
where they developed a new database, maybe taking what was happening in the 1990s and 2000s and refactoring it to something new. Now they're doing that again. And that's another problem that we don't often talk about with databases is that you have a long life project. At a certain point, enough people have made their own little tweaks to it and done their own little adjustments to it that
00:32:39
Speaker
It's gone from being a nice crystalline thing of beauty to having all sorts of funny warts and edge cases and tables that serve one purpose for one report at some point and nobody can quite remember why and everybody's afraid to delete it and that sort of stuff. So they're obviously dealing with that.
00:32:59
Speaker
They're also, you know, and hinted at here, it's not just where the data come from, because, you know, there are scientific archaeological projects, there are construction projects, there are, you know, other early, you know, pre scientific, maybe archaeological projects.
00:33:15
Speaker
that all have to be brought in here, but they also have multiple constituencies, right? They've got the city of Phoenix. They've got visitors to the museum and the park. They've got archaeologists. I'm sure they have some concern for descendant communities that may be interested in certain things that are, and this isn't mentioned explicitly, but certain things that are or are not retained. All of this is just, for me, highlights how complex of a task this can be. And again, good for them for taking it on.
Scalability and Integration Challenges
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And that's, as you mentioned, just the scale of what they had to bring in here. But what gets me is how they are trying to future-proof it. But I can't even imagine trying to future-proof something. I mean, from one standpoint, you can, because they have a table in here showing their different feature data sets and feature classes that they're using, and then kind of a sample of some feature subtypes that they have. And to be honest,
00:34:11
Speaker
Probably not going to discover anything new at this site as far as a feature class goes, right? I mean, that's probably very unlikely at this point. They've been digging here forever. They've been looking at stuff forever. You're just going to find more of what you found already and you need a place to catalog that. So from that standpoint, feature proofing it for that should be relatively easy. But what gets me from a technological and just computer standpoint is future proofing it for stuff we don't even know exists, like new techniques or something, you know, like
00:34:41
Speaker
How are they cataloging, you know, drone aerial imagery, for example, and stuff like that, you know, specifically from drones or maybe some other devices like we've talked about other, you know, mapping systems and devices that might bring in different tools. We just talked about magnetometry. That's not new, but something else might come down the line. That's a little more, you know, technological that again, we don't even know about yet.
00:35:03
Speaker
How do you even plan for something like that unless they've just got like holes almost that these canes can just slot into in their naming convention. So it's interesting trying to think about those future scenarios when you don't know what the future is going to hold.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah. And also, I'm kind of curious, you've mentioned magnetometry and drones and the drone work that I do is all orthomosaics, which means I've taken hundreds of photographs and processing them into one georectified image. Which step along that process do you want to save? Do you want each one of those hundreds of photographs? They're useless. Each one in and of itself is absolutely useless. Well, not absolutely, but it's very little utility. But once they're all stitched together, that's potentially very useful. But as you said, then
00:35:48
Speaker
that the database may or may not be willing to accept a big raster image like that. And that could be a matter of, you know, you have not thought about how to properly categorize and store it, or it might be a matter that that orthomosaic is a huge file and you can't store it within the database, you have to store it on a file and you have to reference it, and so on. So there are all sorts of weird cases that further complicate this sort of project.
00:36:15
Speaker
And I feel like one thing you just said there is a thing that archaeologists kind of need to stop saying, right? Because we get so focused on the products that we have of the work that we do, like the orthomosaic that you put together is a product of these thousands of images. But the thousands of images are just a component and who knows what
00:36:34
Speaker
products of those images could be put together later. You know what I mean? Who knows what somebody could come up with a computer program or something to put those images together potentially in a different way where if all you had was the orthomosaic stored in the database, you might not be able to like
00:36:50
Speaker
deconstruct that in order to get the component parts again in the resolution that you had them in order to do something else with them. You know what I mean? Right. Well, back to the example of the magnetometry. The magnetometry, you typically are presented with the squares that are already processed, but reprocessing, cleanup of various kinds.
00:37:11
Speaker
reprocessing the original dataset can yield different results. So oftentimes, you'll be presented with magometry data that's already you've set, it's been stitched together, it's been cleaned up, you're given a certain histogram. Well, it turns out that if they'd been looking at a different range of values,
00:37:28
Speaker
different features would have shown up and you don't have the ability to do that in the future unless you have access to that source data. So yeah, you don't want to get rid of the source data, but does the source data belong in a database like this? If it doesn't belong in a database like this, how do you not lose track of it? How do you have a reference in a database like this back to the place that you can find the original source data, the original thousands of
00:37:54
Speaker
of drone photos, the original transects that you ran with the magnetometer and so on and so forth. So, wow, just as I think about it, just because more and more complicated, but it's invigorating to me. It's a fun challenge.
00:38:09
Speaker
I always, always think back to when we went to Chaco Canyon back in, I don't know, it was like 2008 or 2007 or something like that. We were on a CRM project and one of the things we learned going through the museum there on site at the park.
00:38:25
Speaker
Some of the early people that came and started, I guess, started documenting Chaco Canyon, not necessarily scientists, but some of the early people that were there, they were staying, of course, in Chaco Canyon. It's not like there was a hotel nearby or they took the train there. You know, they packed in and then stayed there for a while. And pulled down the timber for the firewood.
00:38:44
Speaker
Not only would they do that, but they would put their fires in basically the same place that prehistoric Native Americans put their fires as well, therefore essentially ruining any carbon-14 potential from like the soot and some of the other wood there because the contamination was just rampant. But they were doing this 70 years before radiocarbon dating was even invented. So how could they even have known that they were destroying some sort of future data potential? All they're looking at is the physical structure and going, OK, so
00:39:14
Speaker
you know, we need wood to survive, but everything else we won't touch, you know, so, but we're going to do this. It's just, I don't even know what we're destroying now or not recording adequately for people 70 years from now to be able to use from our data. You know what I mean? And, and that thought, that thought kind of keeps me up at night sometimes when I'm on a project and I'm just like, you know, our job is to record everything we possibly can in the, in the ways that we know with the hope that somebody can do something with this later, even if we can't now.
00:39:46
Speaker
Well, back to the idea that they mentioned here about future-proofing their database is that one way you do that is by doing exactly what they did here, you think about how the database is being constructed and then you document it. So in computer code, you document things, you put in line comments, you do whatever, because
00:40:06
Speaker
Not only is the next person to look at the code, not going to know what you're doing if you don't explain things in detail, you yourself will not know what you're doing if you don't explain things in detail. So this article in and of itself is a little bit of a hedging towards that future. And I think that that's again, I keep on saying it's a good thing, but it is a good thing. Yeah. And one of the things I like too is they have, they mentioned several times in several different circumstances where they have
00:40:37
Speaker
incredibly detailed attribute tables where they, I mean, essentially they didn't, they didn't cut anything out of the recorded data. They just added the attribute tables to it. And what they're making the same is really the, the primary naming conventions. So you can find stuff and categorize stuff. But then once you start digging in, you know, certain projects may have recorded different attributes than other projects over the last hundred years. So, but the attribute tables are, are designed to accommodate those even to the point of,
00:41:03
Speaker
In CRM projects, when we submit stuff to an agency or whatever, there's often feature numbers and or feature letters or designations that sit with the company that maybe those are updated and changed later, but sometimes
00:41:18
Speaker
Depending on how rushed the project manager is, sometimes the site numbers and stuff will get changed in the report and they won't get changed on the site records, like the reference site numbers. The site number on the actual site record will have the agency number, but maybe another site that it references within that will have the temporary site number or something like that because it was just missed.
00:41:41
Speaker
Well, they're cataloging all that as well. They're cataloging the agency numbers, numbers provided by CRM firms, anything they can find, they're cataloging that. So the data is essentially not lost when somebody goes to look at it trying to match it up with some sort of source material, which I can appreciate that. All right. Well, anything else to say on this article?
00:42:03
Speaker
Not right now though again, it's one of those articles that I like because it just sparks a whole bunch of other ideas I can't use it directly with anything I do, but I like to see
00:42:14
Speaker
that other people are thinking about things in something similar to the way I approach things, but also with their own special takes. And those takes might be because they know something that I don't know, or might be because they have different intended outcomes. But I think it's just good to explore, like we're doing here, some things that otherwise we wouldn't normally be doing ourselves in hopes of learning how they can apply to what we do do. And I said do do.
00:42:42
Speaker
that out or not. Wow. Okay. So proving once again that archeologists never grow up, myself included. Yes. Yes. All right. Well, you know, we're going to end this podcast. So, you know, when Paul's house blows down, at least we have the full audio for it. So, you know, it is made of brick, but you never know. You never know. It's an old building. So, Oh yeah.
00:43:06
Speaker
Indeed. Indeed. All right. Well, Paul, when are we going to, when are we going to see you again? Cause you said you're leaving like next week for her, right? Yep. I'm going to, or for about three weeks and then to Lagash after that, I will be, because it isn't like the work I was doing in Saudi, it's an academic project. I expect that I'll be able to find some time to record. I would definitely like to do recordings like we did last year with, uh, with team members about the work that we're doing. So.
00:43:34
Speaker
You and I, Chris, are going to have to figure out exactly how we manage this, but it's not an insurmountable problem like it would have been over the summer when I was away and basically off the grid.
00:43:47
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Well, sounds good. Maybe we'll get Ed Gonzalez tended to come on again. Cause I am going to more than likely see him in a couple of weeks when I'm down in the San Antonio area. Cause that's not, that's not too far from where he's at. So we'll say hi. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, all right. Well, that's it for this one. Check out the link in the show notes to this issue. Again, it's open access. You don't need to be an essay member to see it.
00:44:08
Speaker
So check that out. There's a lot of other cool stuff in there as well. And a lot of good little articles in there. So check out the whole thing and tell us what you think. With that, I think we will see you next time with either me and or somebody else. We'll figure that out. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks.
00:44:32
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.
00:44:58
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster and Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:45:27
Speaker
This is Chris Webster, founder of the APN and one of the chief editors. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. If you want to keep the conversation going and support us along the way, go to arcpodnet.com slash members. That's arcpodnet.com slash members. And thanks for listening.