Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Lagash Spring 2022 Recap - Ep 178
261 Plays3 years ago
Paul's back and fresh off his trip to Irag! We've been talking about the technical approach to the fieldwork and survey for a few months now and Paul's here to tell us how it went. There's a some great lessons learned in this episode and some great archaeology.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/178
Links
- The Lagash Archaeological Project Website
- Dr. Augusta McMahon’s Twitter
- Reed Goodman’s Twitter
- Dr. Brad Hafford’s YouTube Channel
- Paul’s Lapis Lazuli Tweet
- The Archaeology Show: In the Field with the Lagash Archaeological Project, Iraq - Ep 168
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
You've been hearing ads for Zencaster these past months. Interested in sponsoring this show or podcast ads for your business? Go to zen.ai forward slash The Archaeology Show and fill out the contact information so Zencaster can help you bring your business story to life. You're
Trip to Iraq Introduction
00:00:16
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the archaeotech podcast, episode 178. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about Paul's recent trip to Iraq and how his tech plan worked out. Let's get to it.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Paul, welcome back to the States. Why thank you. How you doing? Good. Good. Yeah. We're down in, down in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico again, where we were a few months ago, except an Airbnb this time, just kind of hanging out sort of somewhat local style, I guess better than the resorts anyway. So yeah, yeah, it's nice. Nice down here. Good weather. Nice and sunny.
00:00:59
Speaker
I looked at the weather and it was like 75 to 76 literally every day that we're here for the high. It was just perfect. It's like zero fluctuation. It's nice, but it's always like that down here. That's one
Remote Work in Cabo San Lucas
00:01:12
Speaker
of the reasons why we like it. It gets hot and humid in the August, September timeframe and the rains come, but aside from that, it's pretty much the same weather all year round and it's just great. Nice. How long are you going to be there?
00:01:22
Speaker
We're here for two weeks total. Yeah. Oh wow. Last half of April altogether. So yeah, we got like basically free plane tickets because I still had a bunch of miles and credits from the COVID year and a pretty good deal on this, uh, this Airbnb. So, I mean, it's almost just as affordable as being anywhere else. So we're like, well, let's just, we've got a free place to park the RV. It's at my parents' house. Our solar panels are, are keeping the refrigerator and everything else running. And, uh, we're like, well,
00:01:48
Speaker
If we're not paying for that there, let's just go somewhere else and just work from here. So that's what we're doing. Awesome. Yeah. I'm glad you can do that. Yeah, indeed. All right. Well, we're going to talk about your recent excursion. We obviously talked a few podcasts about your setup for your technical approach, I guess, to the recent phase of the Lagash archaeological project.
00:02:13
Speaker
in Iraq. So why don't we start by, I guess, can you do like a brief, what your plan was in just a few minutes? And then we'll talk about how that went and just some challenges and wins and losses and things you would change next time. But let's start by saying, yeah, what was your original plan for getting the survey done?
Planning Surveys in Iraq
00:02:35
Speaker
Okay. Well, the survey was one part of the project. We have,
00:02:40
Speaker
gearing up to be a bigger long-term excavation with associated projects on it too. I've brought in as the go-to tech guy. We have various components. I was there in the fall for a very brief season. We had two weeks there where I was tasked with making a topographic map with a drone of the entire site.
00:03:02
Speaker
And so we accomplished that. And we had then other things that we learned about from doing that that we wanted to experiment both with drones and then also we wanted to explore the overall use of the site, the development of the site over time. So I devised a surface survey that we could
00:03:19
Speaker
If it worked the way I expected, we would be able to get a huge swath of this site done over the season. For anybody's record, it's a very large site. It's over 450 hectares, the main part of the tell. There's a lot of surface area to cover. Back in Episode 170, I talked about what I was thinking of doing and I was taking some of the better ideas I've seen since I started on CRM.
00:03:46
Speaker
last year, a little under a year ago now, and then tried to bring those ideas back into the academic archaeology that we're going to be doing, specifically with respect to the surface survey. Back in episode 170, I was talking about devising a plan for doing a surface survey using pre-plotted collection points. I laid a grid across the entire site, got the coordinates, the GPS coordinates, and then with iPads or GPS on them,
00:04:15
Speaker
anybody on the survey team would basically go across the site, plant themselves on the target location. Each target location had its own name, unique name. They would plant the stake in the ground. I originally was thinking of a two meter tether, but we ended up producing that down to one meters and just doing a circle around the stake with that tether, collecting everything inside that area circumscribed by the tether.
00:04:44
Speaker
and mark it by the location and come back and then process the data. I was just wondering, using that sampling method, do you know what percentage of the area you're actually sampling with that method? Yes. The initial idea was with that two-meter tether, so that'd be a four-meter diameter circle, because it's just math.
00:05:04
Speaker
Right. I know the size of the site. I know how many points there are. So I tested in GIS a whole bunch of different grid sizes and then also some different tether sizes and the circles, the catchments at each grid point. And then
Archaeological Survey Methods
00:05:19
Speaker
I could just put that in a spreadsheet and see how much it was going to be. So with that initial plan, with the four meter diameter catchments, it was going to be just about 0.5% of the entire site. As it turned out, the
00:05:32
Speaker
first thing I wanted to do is decide if that was a sensible area to cover. And we planted ourselves on a really dense part of the site where we ended up getting five bags full of pottery. And we realized pretty quickly that that was not going to be an appropriate way to deal with the site. So we scaled it down to a one meter tether, so two meter diameter circles at each of the collection points.
00:05:55
Speaker
So, that was a quarter of that. So, we're about 0.13 of the entire site. Once we get the entire site covered. Right now, we've managed to get 60% of the site done in the month that we're there, which I take as a victory. I think that this was really good and I can go into some details why.
00:06:12
Speaker
I thought that was why I do consider this a victory. I also did want to say that episode 170, that was great because we had side discussions afterwards on the APN Slack, the Slack for the members.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah. I provide some very great ideas, some ways of simplifying some of my ideas, a few different ways of visualizing them. It didn't radically change what I wanted to do, but it helped clarify what I was going to do and what I was going to try to do and how I was going to approach it.
00:06:47
Speaker
With that and some feedback I got from other members of the team, by the time we got into the field, I already knew exactly what we were going to do. We had kits ready. The software was all installed. Everything was ready to go. I had written up instruction manuals so we could just jump in on it. That was
00:07:04
Speaker
one of the big benefits is actually just using this as a platform for myself. A little selfishly when I've got this microphone in front of me, but it was used this place as a platform for me to hone my ideas and it really, really worked well for that.
00:07:22
Speaker
We're going to talk about obviously we're going to get into this a little more, but what did you do any more drone work or anything while you were out there this time? Yeah, I did some more drone work. Nothing as intensive as what I did in the fall. Yeah. But we can talk about this in a later segment. But I did drone work with the same drone setup that I had in the fall, which is a DJI Phantom 4 RTK. We're using that for fairly large parts of the site and also some areas outside of the site.
00:07:51
Speaker
Not off the tell proper, that is. And this is cool. So I'm definitely going to want to talk about it. But Sara Pizzi-Menti, who is one of the co-field directors, brought her DJI mini drone, the original mini. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which apparently she takes, she does a lot of field work all over. And she brings this along as a matter of course, in order to do much finer grain mapping at the level of the trenches. And I definitely want to talk about what she did with that because it kind of knocked my socks off.
00:08:22
Speaker
Nice, nice. Before we
Training and Challenges in Surveys
00:08:25
Speaker
get to that, let's talk a little more about the surface survey. Across that entire site with that 50-meter grid, there would have been 1,783 target locations. The first pass that you do with that iPad, that GPS-enabled iPad, if you're on the survey team, you land yourself on one of those points and you take a quick look.
00:08:46
Speaker
grade A, B, or C. Is it positive? Are there artifacts here? Is it negative? There are no artifacts here, or is it a write-off? It's not in a good location for collecting. That not in a good location could be a number of different reasons. It could be that where I plotted these points on GIS, I plotted something off the site, like over in a farmer's field. That was one of the reasons they're write-off.
00:09:07
Speaker
Another reason to write off would be because it's just dirt roads, but there are paths that the cars drive over the site. If one of the points ended up in one of those paths, any collections you made from there would be pretty pointless.
00:09:22
Speaker
The site has been excavated a number of times in the past, so there are old trenches and old spoil heaps. Obviously, collecting surface collections from one of those locations would also be not the best thing, would skew the results. Those were write-offs as well. We had this quick
00:09:38
Speaker
green, red, gray, positive, negative, write off, and then collect everything within the catchment, bag it, name the bag by the collection point. Again, they were all named uniquely. And then at the end of the project, I stopped with the survey a week before the project was over so that we could actually process all these bags. So of that 1783 potential targets, we hit over a thousand of them. So about 60% of the entire site was covered.
00:10:07
Speaker
which means that when we go back in the fall, we'll be able to finish that off pretty easily. And when I say we, I started out with the survey and I did a few days of it myself until I was comfortable. I worked out a few little kinks, some things in the documentation that I figured could be done differently, a few things about procedure that I felt could be improved versus what my expectations were prior to going into it. And then I taught Zayda Rawi, who's another PhD researcher working on the project,
00:10:35
Speaker
and worked with him when I was comfortable with him. He helped me train in one of our representatives, Hadar Sa'at, and worked with him for a couple days. He trained in one of our other representatives, Adelhalak Jassim, and then the two of them, Hadar and Adelhalak, just took off with it.
00:10:55
Speaker
And they ran through the site so fast. They put in such great work. And that really was for me a big win. That was that I could train and they could train and then we didn't have any real drop off in quality because the initial planning was so straightforward. And again, that initial planning was only so straightforward because I got to hone the ideas off of feedback that I got on the member Slack.
00:11:20
Speaker
Nice. Nice. That's really cool. And I think that's a good sign of a good methodology because it shouldn't be complex. It shouldn't be overly complex. It should be straightforward. Here's what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it. And if you were able to teach somebody that and then they're able to pass that knowledge on as well, that's awesome. That's the way it should be, I think.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the really big things why I was able to pass on the knowledge of how to do it is that Heider and I, after he'd spent a couple days with this, we sat down and we bilingualized the data collection. So when I first wrote it, it was all in English, but now all the menu options, every pull down, everything that you could fill out was both in English and Arabic.
00:12:05
Speaker
And that made it easier for him to teach hablahalik, but also I think that as just as a matter of course, that is something important. It really rubbed me the wrong way that I was producing something for work in Iraq that only had an English front end to it. So having this bilingual front end then meant that
00:12:27
Speaker
I felt like I was being more responsible, more courteous to the people whose country I was working in, and I think that it accounted for a better result in the end, not just because he could train out of the Heilich and they could do it quickly, but because he wasn't always guessing what exactly this English word was, right? He had helped me translate, so we'd actually gone through a fairly deep dive as to what the different things were, right? Nice. Why something might be a write-off.
00:12:56
Speaker
Yeah. It wasn't just
Bilingual Data Collection
00:12:58
Speaker
a word on a piece of paper or in this case on an iPad, it was an actual discussion. Well, do we want to write off animal burrows? Yeah, probably. Okay. Well, why would that be? Well, that affects the site and churning up stuff from deeper underground. Okay. But we had those discussions.
00:13:16
Speaker
which the hider, the other representatives, they're professionals. They understand this. They care for it probably in a way that I couldn't ever hope to because it's their country. But having those discussions, we could think they honed my thoughts, I honed theirs, and we got together a better product in the end. That product, again, being the state of collection
00:13:35
Speaker
software. I don't think I mentioned it yet today, but I did mention it on episode 170. What I ended up settling on for the data collection software was ArcGIS field maps. I looked at a bunch of different data collection software, but
00:13:53
Speaker
University of Pennsylvania has a licensed ArcGIS, which gives them access to field maps so I could install that. It meant no extra software costs. I could have done this in other mobile GIS packages, but that's what we went with. It was a little weird to set up initially, but once I got my brain around how it worked, how to set things up, that worked really nicely. And then again, I was able to bilingualize it because it didn't choke too badly. The bilingual stuff is often a problem, but it's
00:14:22
Speaker
really often a problem when you're working in another script that's right to left as opposed to right. Working with Arabic, which also has ligatures that don't exist in Latin languages, software either handles it or it chokes badly. I only had a couple of places where that Field Maps data collection was having a little bit of a trouble. Not enough to cause any problems, but just enough to look a little funny in my eyes.
00:14:48
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, that's something getting both of those languages in there. First off, that's awesome to be able to see that. And then yeah, it does make sense to have it in the local language and to have it just work like that. So I totally get that too.
00:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's an ethical obligation to try to be as inclusive as possible. And that's something that Western researchers in the Middle East have long been dinged for, rightfully so, is that they go in with the colonial mindset that, hey, we know best and you have to adapt to us. And that said, I don't speak Arabic nearly as well as I should. And I'm very embarrassed by that. But I do recognize that that's something I have to work on and fix.
00:15:31
Speaker
In the little places I could, again, like bilingualizing the data collection, that's something that was fairly easily accomplished, but I think brought a much greater benefit than the effort it took. Speaking Arabic is one thing, especially when you're around people, but can you read any Arabic too? Yeah, I can.
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's very phonetic. Once you learn the characters and how they link together, one character or the other, what those ligatures are, you can probably get the pronunciation. Maybe not always, depending on a variety of factors.
00:16:08
Speaker
once your vocabulary reaches a certain level, you can probably guess the meaning of words that you don't previously know. I'm maybe at the cusp of doing that, but I can't read much. So I can read words, but not sentences. Let's put it that way. Right. Right. All right. Well,
Podcast Segments Announcement
00:16:27
Speaker
on that note, let's go ahead and take a break and we'll come back and continue talking to Paul about his experiences on the Logash archaeological project in Iraq this past month and a half or so. All right, back in a minute.
00:16:40
Speaker
First Webster here. I have a pretty full calendar and managing that calendar can be pretty challenging. I've got things to do every day and things I need to do once a week. Of course, people book on my calendar all the time and I have to manage that as well. I used to move my recurring events around when something would disrupt them, but now I don't have to.
00:16:55
Speaker
This is where motion comes in. It's an intelligent AI that manages your day for you. Put events that don't involve other people in as tasks and motion will move them around and break them up in ways that you dictate so you get everything done. If you'd like to take back your time and your day, then head over to arkpodnet.com slash motion and check it out. That's arkpodnet.com slash motion to get at least 25% more efficient with your time.
00:17:20
Speaker
Looking to expand your knowledge of x-rays and imaging in the archaeology field? Then check out an introduction to paleoradiography, a short online course offering professional training for archaeologists and affiliated disciplines. Created by archaeologist, radiographer, and lecturer James Elliott, the content of this course is based upon his research and teaching experience in higher education.
00:17:39
Speaker
It is approved by the Register of Professional Archaeologists and the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists as four hours of training. So don't miss out on this exciting opportunity for professional and personal development. For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P-A-L-E-O, imaging.com, and check out the link in the show notes.
00:18:01
Speaker
We've got regular live events coming up that we don't want you to miss. Head over to our new parent website, Culturo, and check out the live events calendar. We're ramping it up slowly, so bookmark and check back often. That's CulturoMedia.com with a K. Once again, that's CulturoMedia.com.
00:18:18
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archeotech Podcast, Episode 178. We're talking with Paul about the Lagash Archeological Project. I was just wondering, Paul, do you got anything else you want to mention about the surface survey before we move on? Yeah.
Artifact and Site Feature Notation
00:18:30
Speaker
One of the other things I was mentioning about the positives, negatives, and write-offs, those are the target locations, but we also realized
00:18:37
Speaker
that there are going to be other things that you encounter that aren't at the target locations. It might be an artifact that you want to know. It might be some destruction to the site. It could be any of a number of different things. Architectural features that are visible on the surface, that sort of stuff. So I created another database layer also in that same collection
00:18:57
Speaker
for notes, and those were very freeform. Write a little description, grab something from a pull-down, take a photograph if you want. With that, we had just about 700 notes ancillary to the main part of the surface survey because it became so effortless for us to do that. If we'd see a drain or we would see part of a wall or something,
00:19:21
Speaker
no point not to just note it here. Here's a GPS coordinates. Here's a photograph of it. Keep on moving. It barely slowed down the main part of the survey and realized this is not systematic. But when you have that 700 notes spread out over about half the site, about 60% of the site, if you look at just at that layer, the whole map is blue with all these note markers. So that was kind of cool. And then there are a couple other things. I developed it so that
00:19:50
Speaker
It didn't take much expertise to be able to do the surface survey, the collection part. The idea was that I wanted it to be as reproducible as possible, not to be as dumb as possible. I wanted to be able to have Heider's results and my results be virtually identical.
00:20:07
Speaker
Right? Yeah. And if we were to bring you out in the field, Chris, your results would be virtually identical because there wouldn't be a whole lot of thinking. There wouldn't be a whole lot of picking up objects and looking at them and say, oh, is this piece of slag big enough for me to bring in? Oh, is this posture diagnostic or not?
00:20:25
Speaker
We offloaded all that to the field processing, which is what I did for the last week. Basically, each one of these bags, we went and I devised a data collection, what's the right word, form in WildNote. We sit down and account and weigh each of the classes of objects, so slag,
00:20:47
Speaker
simple wear pottery, storage, wear pottery, stone, lithics, non-lithic stone. And then the idea was to be able to make heat maps of those at the end in GIS. And that went really well. So we processed all, but I missed I think 28 or 29 of the bags that just ran out of time at the end. So we got almost everything processed.
00:21:14
Speaker
in the same field season that we did all the data collection. A few days ago, I generated heat maps of the kinds of distributions that I thought were significant with pottery, with slag, and with stones and lithics not aggregated together.
00:21:33
Speaker
So, those heat maps, I think, show us where different kinds of activities were happening on the site. So, we still have to have a group meeting to discuss what I mapped with that. But, again, proof of concept, this was pretty quick and easy. And, importantly, I think it'll be pretty reproducible. So, we had that. But then, the other cool thing, and I know that you get upset sometimes talking about objects, but...
00:22:01
Speaker
Our
Significant Discoveries
00:22:02
Speaker
archaeologists, even if they get upset with the object-centricness of a lot of it, also like objects and artifacts. In the surface survey, at one of the locations, we found a cylinder seal on the surface. The pottery distribution there was odd. One of the police guards that was with me that day came up as I was making the collection at the target. From a short distance away, he showed me what he found on the surface, which was a human finger bone.
00:22:32
Speaker
Okay. So I think that we may have located the, uh, the ancient cemetery of the site just from the surface survey. We obviously will have to go back and look at it. And I didn't get the chance to bring any of my colleagues out there to take a closer look at it. But I think I can make a strong argument for why this is where this were at least a cemetery was located. And then another thing that came up that was really cool was one of the reasons why we're looking at slag, for example, is we want to get a sense of where the production areas, where the industrial areas of the site were.
00:23:02
Speaker
And that's why I was saying stone and lithics. What I found was that I'd find lots of little multicolored pebbles, you know, jaspers and various like quartz and things. But where I tended to find those, I also found a lot of lithics, which I'm not sure why those two tended to go together, but they seem to be some sort of correlation. Looking at slag, looking at the distribution of the stones, we can get some sense perhaps of where the ancient work areas were on the site.
00:23:29
Speaker
One of the things that we found, which was really cool, was a nice big hunk of lapis lazuli, about four centimeters long, maybe a little longer. That's this vivid blue stone. It was used a lot in statuary and in cylinder seals and jewelry in ancient Mesopotamia. It's not native from there. It's brought in all the way from Afghanistan.
00:23:57
Speaker
4,500 years ago, somebody trekked a long way to get that stone or that stone trekked a long way through a lot of hands to get from where it's found to where it was going to be worked into something. This big piece of unworked stone tells us that there's some sort of lapidary workshop in that spot or near to that spot where I collected it.
00:24:16
Speaker
And that brings up then another thing that we want to have a social media presence on the site, which meant for the most part, Twitter for us. So I posted Cylinder Seal, did not post The Human Bone, which also wasn't from one of the target collections. But I did post a picture of that lapis lazuli. And that I think has had more engagement than any other post I've ever had.
00:24:36
Speaker
of people really excited by it because if it's something that you know, it's something that everybody knows and everybody loves. It's like, oh, that's a great piece of lapis. Also, aside from just being something really interesting to look at, does potentially tell us about what was going on in the past on the site and where that kind of activity was happening.
00:24:57
Speaker
So that was useful. And it was good to have the social media presence. It was mostly Reed Goodman, myself, and Dr. Augusta McMahon, who is the other co-field director of the project, posting on Twitter. But all of our posts got a lot of engagement, and there's now a lot of Iraqi archaeologists posting on Twitter as well.
00:25:18
Speaker
So there was a lot of back and forth between us and them, you know, mostly likes, but a few questions here and there. Where did you find that? What's it like? Does it compare to what we've been finding? But it's interesting to me because it forms then this whole
00:25:34
Speaker
new, fairly new channel for communication amongst scholars that's not in a regular scholarly venue and is also open to the public so the public can see what we're doing in a very open and accessible way. So I thought that was also a valuable kind of side effect of what we were doing.
00:25:52
Speaker
I think it's really valuable for the public to see the scientific process happening in real time. You know what I mean? Because it's always sort of smoke and mirrors for people who don't understand what's happening. I think it's one good thing that Twitter is actually really good for. Yeah, it's not just for getting into political fights with people. There's also some good collaboration that happens there.
Podcast Recording in Iraq
00:26:15
Speaker
Speaking of seeing things happening real time on the scientific process, where are you with the editing of the archaeology show? And for our listeners, we decided to try something
00:26:30
Speaker
interesting new to us is that four of us on the project decided to record a podcast episode for the archaeology show while we were in the field. And we decided that it would be interesting to try to break it up, not do it as a one shot, but record it in three different segments at three different times of the season. So we recorded the first segment fairly early at the start of the project with what our hopes and expectations would be.
00:26:53
Speaker
Next one in the middle of the project with a progress update, you know, what's worked, what hasn't. And then the final one, wrap up, which we kept on getting bumped. The last few days were hectic, which always happens on projects. So we couldn't get everybody together. Finally, three of us in the airport were together and decided to record the final episode in the waiting room at the gate. So your editing is going to be lots of fun. I'm sure the sound levels are different every time.
00:27:22
Speaker
Yes. Well, that podcast will have already been out by the time people are hearing this. So let me, yeah, cause it's going to come out on a Sunday. We're recording this on Thursday before it comes out. So let me check the episode number on that real quick. But yeah, I, because of my, my schedule and how things are working, I haven't actually edited the damn thing yet. I'm planning on doing it tomorrow, actually.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah, tomorrow is my editing hole for TAS right now this week. But it's going to be episode 168. So just look for that. And like I said, it will have come out the Sunday prior to this releasing. So if you're listening to this in real time, it is already out. Well, if you're listening to this anytime, it's already out. So episode 168.
00:28:04
Speaker
I'll probably try to link to that episode in the show notes for this one. I'll have to remember to do that because I can't do that until that one posts. Well, I kind of can. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I'm wondering real quick before I lose this thought in my head, the finger bone. You know for a fact it was human, like there's indisputable. I am not a bone specialist. I don't know indisputably, but it certainly looked like it to me. I took a picture and everybody that I showed it to said, oh yeah, that's people.
00:28:33
Speaker
Because I know you're on a really ancient site and there is a cemetery there. You guys know that there's one there because you're saying you may have found it just because of this finger bone. But man, any other archaeological site in the United States, it doesn't matter where it is or how old we think it is. If remains are found and
00:28:54
Speaker
Maybe you didn't know you were gonna find remains or you're not in like a confirmed cemetery setting right now It's like everything shuts down and the authorities are called in now with it being one of the the police there that actually found the bone I'm guessing it was all it was all great but was there just no procedure because of where you're at and what you're expecting to find or is there just no real procedure around that to begin with unless you guys say something and
00:29:18
Speaker
I'm not sure what the actual rules are, so somebody who knows better should chime in and correct me on the Slack or on Twitter. But we definitely have to treat human remains with care and respect. Sure. And they have to be recorded with the antiquities authority, but I don't know what happens after that. I do know that we had three trenches open, 10 by 10s. Actually, one was 10 by 15.
00:29:45
Speaker
And we encountered at least five human burials in these trenches. Some of them were intact. One was a flex burial with a small jar buried with the person. Another one was two, maybe three people, totally commingled, spread out across a couple different rooms in the trench that we were excavating.
00:30:11
Speaker
So, different kinds of post-depositional processes there. We're not sure why the one or two or however many bodies got scattered so badly, but obviously the other ones were fairly intact burials.
00:30:27
Speaker
Okay. All those bones are in storage, and I don't know if their final disposition is to go back to Baghdad or what happens. It's never been something I've dealt with in the past, so it's all new to me. But yeah, I'm confident.
00:30:42
Speaker
I would give it 95% confidence that that was a human finger bone. Okay. And back to the social media. So in addition to this podcast that we decided, in addition to Twitter and this podcast, which we decided would be an interesting experiment, what's it like?
00:30:58
Speaker
on a project. Dr. Brad Hafford, who's on the project, he also has his own YouTube channel devoted to archaeology, and he had been videotaping everything on the project and was going to put together some videos for that. So we have a multi-pronged approach to that, which I'm hoping gets some traction. I hope it shows people
00:31:20
Speaker
that good field work, which is what I think we did, is a really collaborative process between a bunch of different people with a bunch of different skills and insights and aptitudes that can work together to try to reach a common goal. The goal isn't a set, hey, we found this or we did that, but we together learned something about this site and about how people in the past lived here.
00:31:47
Speaker
I'm just going to, in passing, mention one of the other projects on this project, which was Reed Goodman's soil cores. I mention it because with the social media, that's the reason why we only had three of us, rather than the four of us who were recording the other segments of that episode. Only three of us were at the airport that day because Zayd El-Rawi had to spend an extra week helping Baghdad.
00:32:11
Speaker
negotiating with the antiquities authorities and with customs, there was some disconnect between the two of them in order to get soil cores back out of the country. And so when I was there in the fall, I was there to do the mapping, but I was also there to support and read in collecting soil cores. And I did that, but then he couldn't bring them out of the country, even though he thought he had all the permissions.
00:32:35
Speaker
So he and Zade both had to stick around for an extra week in a couple days at the end of this project in order for Zade to work his magic, which I'm really pleased to say he managed to in the end and they arrived a couple days ago. Soil cores in hand. We're all absolutely elated that that happened.
00:32:55
Speaker
Wow. Wow. I mean, I think a soil core, I think of like 20 meter long tube. How big are these soil cores that they had? Right. So I mean, that is what happened. So Rick is looking at long-term changes in the environment in Southern Iraq and trying to get a sense of what the environment was like when these cities started to congeal, when they started to be cities.
Soil Core Study
00:33:18
Speaker
And the idea kind of being, and this isn't his idea, but the idea is that we learned that
00:33:24
Speaker
As kids in middle school, these tell sites form because they've got irrigation canals to bring water into the fields and whatnot around the cities. But it's beginning to look like it was a much marshier wetter environment with the headwaters of the Gulf farther north.
00:33:41
Speaker
than they currently are in antiquity. This is a much more marshy, riverine, lacustrine, estuary kind of environment. Some of these canals may not have been to bring water in, but may have been to bring water out.
00:33:57
Speaker
Anyhow, he's looking at long-term changes through time with these soil cores, and he's done them in a bunch of different places. You're right. The big one, he hired a company that does environmental testing that did a soil core that I think went down about 25 meters.
00:34:12
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. So you don't bring out a 25 meter long chunk of soil. You bring out ones that are about a half meter long each. Yeah, sections of it, right? And each one is recorded from this depth to that depth and this depth and that depth. And they're all recorded with their locations. And because we hired this company and they wanted to show what they were doing with archaeology, I flew the drone to take some glamour shots of them at work. Nice.
00:34:38
Speaker
And again, it was a collaborative process. And those guys were awesome. In the fall, we tried doing cores and we were just plagued by problems. But these guys, the company was RSK, which is an Iraqi-based company. And they were the consummate professionals. I showed up to work with them. They're like, get away from the perimeter. And there was the yellow tape.
00:34:59
Speaker
Here, here's your plugs. Here's the hard hat. You can't come within this area without wearing the hard hat. And you could see they were a well oil team. The four of these men working together, they just knew what to do. And even then it took them, I think five days of drilling to get down that 25 meters with their training and their expertise and their equipment. She's a little different than the soil cores you were using back in the fall, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Really much more professional setup than what we were doing. Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:29
Speaker
All right. Well, that is the end of the segment. Let's call it there and we'll come back on the other side and wrap up this discussion back in a minute.
00:35:39
Speaker
We've got a contest. The folks over at AEO's screen are giving one of our listeners a brand new screen. Pick anything from their website and they'll ship it to you. Not an archaeologist? No problem. These are great for gardening and other tasks around the house. I mean, come on, right? Anyway, these are great screens and you won't be disappointed. We'll pick the winning entry at the end of May. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash screen for details on how to enter. It's easy and you can get multiple entries. Increase your chances by helping out others. That's arcpodnet.com slash screen for details on how to win.
00:36:13
Speaker
Want to keep this conversation going? Want to talk to the host of this show and other fans? Then join our membership program and get exclusive access to the host's other fans and early access to these episodes and bonus segments and content. You'll also get forever access to our live show back catalog and any other shows ad free. Head over to arkpodnet.com slash members for details. That's arkpodnet.com slash members.
00:36:38
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archiotech podcast, episode 178. And I hope over the commercial break there that you guys poured your drinks. I've got my Mexican whiskey here with me. Probably shouldn't because I'm still coming out of a cold, but I think we're going to talk drones.
Drone Mapping and Analysis
00:36:54
Speaker
You've got whiskey for a drone discussion. I do indeed. It's probably a really bad idea.
00:37:01
Speaker
That's a really bad idea. So you mentioned you brought your drone back out, and we've talked about one of the other people out there brought a drone out as well, two very different drones doing two very different things. So let's talk about what you guys are doing with those.
00:37:15
Speaker
Right. I was mapping at a macro level, not fully at the level that I did over the fall when I was mapping the entirety of the site, but I would fly at 100 meters, different blocks of the site. This was for a variety of reasons. Chief amongst is that
00:37:36
Speaker
The soil conditions, it was not rainy when we were there, but it had been raining prior to us getting there. It meant that the architecture, just subsurface, the ancient architecture was really visible from the air. I programmed a couple roots that would fly blocks of the site that I would do every couple of days. Then I would
00:37:59
Speaker
take all those, make orthogonal mosaics of them with drone deploy, and hand those over to the site architect who was going absolutely blind nightly. Not because of that. Going blind nightly because he would sit up
00:38:14
Speaker
looking at these orthomosaics and plotting out where he could see walls and streets and other features of various types, subsurface. You can't really see them when you're walking on the site. In some cases, you can, but for the most part, you can't. But as soon as you get up 100 meters, some of them pop. I mean, there's no denying. You're like, oh yeah, there's a house, there's a city wall, there's this, there's that. Well, look at this street. It runs through this whole neighborhood.
00:38:40
Speaker
All sorts of great stuff like that. And this isn't anything new. This is stuff that people have been doing with drones to some extent, but definitely with aerial photographs like corona imagery for quite a while now. But it was really effortless for me to just program this flight route and do the exact same flight route today, tomorrow.
00:39:01
Speaker
first thing in the morning, end of the day, whatever, and then just hand them to Mark, the architect, and let him work on what he could see. So we're going to circle back with that. Also see how that interrelates with any of the stuff that we found on the surface survey. If we can start to see patterns in the kinds of buildings that there are in relation to the kinds of artifacts that we find in the surface survey.
00:39:25
Speaker
So that's what I was doing on one of the flights. I noticed part of the city wall, and we know where parts of the city wall is, but this is an extension that we hadn't seen. And it was so clear that my jaw dropped when I saw it on the screen on the iPad while I was flying.
00:39:45
Speaker
You know, the reps were nearby working on their part of my surface survey. And so when they finished up, I called them over to go show them and they were really excited too. But after I saw it from the air, we could see it crystal clear on the ground. I mean, you could practically cut yourself on these lines. They were flat.
00:40:04
Speaker
But one part, that's where the wall is. And here's where the city gate is. And here's inside the wall. And there's the glassy or something on the other side. So that was really exciting that we could use this real time. It's not like going and looking at old satellite imagery, old spy photos, whatever. It was, hey, could you check this area?
00:40:23
Speaker
And so then alongside with that same, you know, kind of middle level drone scale, drone mapping, Zaid was also really interested in what's happening off of the main tell of Lagash, because there are a number of small features, small tells all around. So I flew those so that he could have those mapped as well. And he identified a few new sites that had not been previously documented, including one which was really thrilling to me, had
00:40:52
Speaker
a fair amount of Uruk period pottery on it, which is really amazing. If you don't know what the Uruk is, it is the time period of the fourth millennium BCE where writing is developed.
00:41:07
Speaker
where these cities really congeal into these big things. So this is very old and very interesting in Mesopotamian history. And I keep on using the word interesting, I should find a better word. Very important, very significant in Mesopotamian history, but also to a large extent to world history beyond that, because this is some of the first time that people are doing this sort of stuff anywhere in the world. So finding that site and being able to map it was also really, really cool. And we mapped it again.
00:41:37
Speaker
effortlessly from the sky. The other effortless thing, and this blew me away more than anything I did, frankly, was like I said, Sada had brought in this DJI Mavic Mini, the original Mavic Mini, which she has done to other projects. She's a very active field archaeologist.
00:41:58
Speaker
I was like, what are you going to do with that? She said, oh, I'm going to map the trench at the end of the day. That's what she was doing. She was just popping it up in the sky, flying it for 10 minutes, and taking a couple dozen shots of her trench from a bunch of different angles. Bring that back down into the lab at the end of the day, load it up in metashape, and generate photogrammetry of her trench day by day.
00:42:22
Speaker
which I know that people do that, but I didn't realize the kind of casualness that she could bring to it of just, yeah, this is what I do. It's no different than you do in a sketch map at every day, except for it's much more highly accurate than that sketch map.
00:42:37
Speaker
And you can rotate it around this way and that way. And if you're doing it every day, you can compare today against tomorrow against the day after with colors and textures and such. And then you can also hand it back to the architect who can then go and do your nice finished site plans, trench maps at any particular phase based off of those photogrammetric models, which was
00:42:58
Speaker
Wow, real value add to me. This absolutely should be in everybody's toolbox. Not sure about meta shape, that's expensive, but there are other options too. Personally, I'm playing with WebODM at home to see if I can accomplish something similar. But again, it's the casualness of, yeah, this is the tool I use.
00:43:19
Speaker
She's an adapt but not a tech-heavy person. Why wouldn't I use it? I use a camera. This camera happens to be mounted on an airplane and it takes a bunch of pictures. I can run through the software and turn it into a model. End of story.
00:43:34
Speaker
And it's great that the drone itself is no longer the technological impediment to doing something like this, right? It really is the processing software that you actually do something with all those images. But that in itself is just through time, there's going to be more options. Metashape is expensive and a lot of people aren't going to use that unless they're
00:43:55
Speaker
associated with the university or something like that, or can just afford it. But like you said, there are some other options out there that can be used, but it's easy enough just to throw. I've got one of those DJI Mavic Minis. It actually sits up in the cabinet above our driver's seat in the RV.
00:44:12
Speaker
And we can pull it out pretty much at any time. The batteries stay pretty well charged. And I can just pull it out. I can have it up flying in probably two or three minutes if I wanted to. And it's super easy to just take out, throw it up in the air, and let it fly. And it uses hardly any energy for that effort. And in fact, if she had the standard three battery package,
00:44:34
Speaker
Which I mean, depending on how much, yeah, depending on how much she was using it, she probably didn't even need to charge those batteries more than once every few days. If that, depending on how often she was doing those images. So yeah, so they were using all three trenches and I think that they were only dipping into the second battery.
00:44:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. They're so efficient. That was awesome. One caveat I will say about this particular model is that one of the days it stopped working, it would not turn on. The whole drone just wouldn't turn on? The whole drone would not turn on. Wow. Since I'd already demonstrated my technical chops by fixing the washing machine.
00:45:07
Speaker
That's a different story. She's like, hey, Paul, can you fix this? And I'm like, well, yes or no. Those are the answers. But if you don't mind me tearing it apart, I can see what I can do. So I found a couple of videos online. And one of them, somebody was saying, oh, yeah, it's really easy for dirt to get into the power button. And then it behaves this way. And what he showed was exactly what I had. So I tore it apart, grabbed a bunch of alcohol white pads,
00:45:31
Speaker
And I squeezed that isopropyl alcohol because we didn't have any into the button and worked it through there and let it dry off and it worked fine. And so then after that, they did two things. One is that they always kept it in a plastic bag when it was out on the site because it's a very dusty site.
00:45:48
Speaker
And the other is that Mark started doing a cleaning routine every couple of days on it. Blowing it out, cleaning up some of the moving parts with some of the electrical spray. I don't know if you've seen that, but people use it on things like potentiometers that they could crackly if they get a little corroded. So he was using that and it worked great the whole rest of the time. So that's what I would add is the caveat is that if you're using something like that,
00:46:18
Speaker
you know, be casual about it, but if you're a little too casual, then you'll run into trouble.
Drone Maintenance Advice
00:46:23
Speaker
Well, yeah, some feedback on the last episode of this with Daniel, I forgot to pronounce his last name, Carvalho, I think it was. He is doing robotics and archaeology. Robotics is related to archaeology, and he's literally building a robot.
00:46:37
Speaker
in Portugal, where he's at. And he's one of the feedback pieces that we got from one of our longtime fans and somebody who's an engineer and knows these types of things. He's like, yeah, your biggest problem is going to be dirt. He's like, it's great and I'll get a robot out to do archaeology, but how are you going to keep it clean? Because these things
00:46:58
Speaker
just fail immediately when they get dirty. And when you said the drone wouldn't turn on as an avionics technician, I was going to be like, yeah, if it doesn't power on, it's got one of two problems. It's either not getting power, so it's in the power bay. Those contacts are dirty or something like that.
00:47:14
Speaker
Or it's the button that actually turns it on. I mean, those are really, you know, the two places to start. I mean, the worst case scenario is it's some circuit board failure, but it's almost never that, right? It's going to be something a little more, a little more simple. So, but yeah, keeping that stuff clean is a good, a good lesson for everybody to listen to.
00:47:30
Speaker
Well, the trick with the DJI stuff for anybody that hasn't used one is that to turn on or off their equipment, their drones in particular, it's like hold it for half a second, release for half a second, then hold it for two seconds. So it's this whole funny timing dance that you have to do with the power button.
00:47:46
Speaker
Yeah, and I've used a bunch of their equipment and some of them are easy and some of them are extremely tricky And so this wasn't it was working one day and then stopped working It got a little finicky and got a little more finicky, but whether or not it would be finicky it was hard to tell because
00:48:04
Speaker
Was it the first press that was not depressing fully or was it the second long press that was not depressing fully? It didn't act like a power button issue per se because the power button essentially is two power buttons.
00:48:24
Speaker
It was a little tricky to diagnose, but as soon as I saw that video, I was like, okay, that's it. That one on that video was really disgusting on the inside. I was just mildly dusty. Yeah, nice. Well, as you caught it ahead of time is what you did and then had procedures around it.
00:48:47
Speaker
All right. Well, what do we have left to talk about in your procedures out
Survey Methodology Analysis
00:48:51
Speaker
there? What would you change? You guys are going back out again. Did everything work well enough that you want to continue on with your methodology? Are you going to bring something new or lose something that didn't quite work well?
00:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, so in terms of the surface survey, the data collection worked brilliantly. I'm really happy with that. The data processing, I had, like I said, I started building out of form in WildNote. Actually, we used it, but I had enough requests for different things on it that it got a little unwieldy. I couldn't draft them in a way that I wanted and then
00:49:27
Speaker
exporting the data meant that I had to re-merge data in a database afterwards. None of that was a problem, but what I would do is I would redesign that data processing form going forward, which is fine because I can finish those last 29 or 30 bags, whatever it was, and then move to a new form to re-aggregate the questions in a slightly different way, and then it'll be easier to process. The other thing that
00:49:55
Speaker
probably was the biggest failure was we brought along a thermal imaging camera, a FLIR boson. And we
Thermal Imaging Challenges
00:50:05
Speaker
also purchased a gimbal setup so that we could attach it to that phantom drone and fly it and do some thermal imaging. The idea being that
00:50:14
Speaker
We could see with the naked eye, with the camera mounted on the drone, we could see the subsurface architecture. We wanted to see if there were different heat signatures for the subsurface architecture versus the matrix that they were in. The answer is yes.
00:50:29
Speaker
But I had a lot of trouble with that gimbal system. I'm not going to throw the company under the bus, but the instructions were terrible. It was not balanced right and could not be balanced right. There was a way of loosening a screw and adjusting the camera left and right to adjust the roll. And I could not adjust it far enough for this very light FLIR Bose on camera.
00:50:52
Speaker
Okay. So I brought all that back and I'm going to redesign all the pieces. So last night I was making a new arm for the gimbal, a shorter one so that the balance should be better. So we'll see how that works. Another issue that I ran into it is I got the lens on the Boson has a
00:51:09
Speaker
13 degree field of view, which based off of what I could find online, what I could find on the website of the company that sold the camera, I thought that was an appropriate angle. What it turns out is that it's way too narrow of a view.
00:51:26
Speaker
for doing large neighborhood level kind of views of the site. But it did work well at the trenches. And we could actually see subsurface architecture that they were going to run into tomorrow. And we could see the continuation of walls that we found in the trench outside of the trenches. But I had a lot of trouble with that gimbal setup. It would freak out and go all twitchy and then point who knows which direction. So I'm redesigning that.
00:51:55
Speaker
Another problem related to the poor instructions was that I was told that I could capture the video on a video screen, a little handheld video monitor. So transmit via radio from the drone down to this monitor. And I could capture on that, and I could, but the quality was really bad. Very pixelated, lots of artifacts, lots of random lines running through it. Was not happy with that at all.
00:52:21
Speaker
The control either for the gimbal or else the radio for projecting that imagery back to the monitor interfered with the controller of the drone. If I'd get it passed about 100 meters from me, the drone would lose signal and then try to return home.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah, not exactly ideal. Toward the end, when I'd basically given up anything, to counteract the balance, what I ended up doing is I took some very thick metal wire that I found and I made a little bracket that I glued on to the gimbal that I attached a AAA battery to as a counterbalance. And that worked okay, but obviously that's Clue G Beyond Belief, so that's why I'm redesigning parts of it. So I wanted to see if I could
00:53:09
Speaker
capture the video directly on board on the airplane. So I programmed a Raspberry Pi to capture video off of the second video port from the camera because it has two. And that worked well. And so I came up with an idea of using Raspberry Pi Zero to do that next time. And then I started
00:53:28
Speaker
Google it, maybe there's a device I can buy that'll do that, that I can mount directly, rather than have to do this with the Raspberry Pi Zero and the extra battery that that's going to have to bring and so on and so forth. And I found an article about somebody describing different things. And one of the things they had in there was a picture of three different models of this onboard DVR kind of device that you could have. And one of those models I recognized, because there was an empty case of that,
00:53:55
Speaker
in the box with the gimbal. I had no idea what it was. It was just a clear plastic case, no markings. But I'm like, oh, that's the same clear plastic case that... Oh, and I went and looked, and one of the little buried circuit boards on that gimbal assembly was a little onboard DVR. Oh, geez. So the solution that I concocted with the Raspberry Pi Zero was unnecessary. I could record things directly on the DVR onboard.
00:54:24
Speaker
So I guess that's good to know. Long story short, this was not a success, but I learned a lot and I have some ideas that might make it a success when we go back in the fall. So I'm redesigning parts and hopefully we'll have some better results next time. Okay.
00:54:43
Speaker
All right. Well, that is just about all the time for this show. I'm sure that if anything else comes around on this and we want to bring it up, we'll talk about it in future shows. But otherwise, yeah, this was really cool to have kind of bookend and then and then have the middle portion here, like on the archaeology show. I'm really looking forward to actually editing that here in the next couple of days so I can hear it because that's really fun. Be careful what you wish for. Yeah.
00:55:10
Speaker
And, uh, well, you know, think people got these things people have to remember is, I mean, this podcast, this next, this episode of the archeology show was recorded. I mean, in, in real life, right? And not, not sitting in an office with a, with a microphone somewhere is recorded at the field in multiple areas and an airport and just, uh, you know, water bustles in the background, all sorts of stuff. Exactly. Exactly. So that is pretty cool. And I hope people understand that. So,
00:55:36
Speaker
Yeah, I hope that they get the content of it. We had great discussions around what work we were doing. And again, it was such a good team to work with. They were really enthusiastic and helpful and supportive of each other. So it was a lot of fun to just sit back for half an hour and chat about what we thought about what we were doing. Yeah, for sure.
00:55:55
Speaker
Cool. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Paul. This has been awesome. And I hope we can, again, when you go back out, do it again sometime. I know you got some other interesting fieldwork coming up, too. And maybe we can talk about that as well. Certainly. All right. Well, thanks, everybody. And we will see you next time. Take care.
00:56:16
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.
00:56:42
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.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:57:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Please consider joining our growing core of members over at arcpodnet.com slash members. If you liked what you heard, consider leaving a review wherever you're listening to this.