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Web Mapping and Active Learning With LIDAR Data - Ep 127
230 Plays5 years ago
The phrase, “archaeologists aren’t taught to do that” is prevalent in archaeology. What are archaeologist’s taught? Well, this paper attempts to use alternative methods and crowdsourcing to analyze LIDAR data and overcome some of the shortfalls of academic education.
Links
- 2020 Marion Forest, et. al., “Testing Web Mapping and Active Learning to Approach Lidar Data”. Advances in Archaeological Practice 8(1), 2020, pp 25-39:
- DOI: 10.1017/aap.2019.42
- PDF of the Article
- Bose Frames
App of the Day
- Webby: Microsoft Soundscape
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
Episode Overview: Crowdsourcing and LiDAR
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archiotech Podcast, Episode 127. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we discuss a recent article about building an online web mapping interface for crowdsourcing lidar data. Let's get to it.
00:00:34
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how are you doing? I am doing okay. A little harried with all the work that we've had lately. But yeah, nothing really to complain about. How about you, Chris? Good, good. I mean, I'm just lucky to have a job where I can work. So in this day and age, that's a good thing. Yes, yes, it is.
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah.
Recording Context: Pandemic Era
00:00:54
Speaker
So, and as with all the episodes that we're recording during the coronavirus timeframe, because podcasts are typically evergreen and you might be listening to this in 2025 or 2030 or whatever, it is currently April 22nd when we're recording this. So yeah, exactly. Happy birthday, April 22nd on 2020. So that's what, uh,
00:01:15
Speaker
the current data is today. And I always say, just in case when this comes out, the world has actually come to an end or the apocalypse has taken hold and this virus has turned into a zombie virus, which I'm pretty much expecting to happen over the winter. So, okay. So yeah, episode, episode 150, we'll be talking about zombie, zombie tracking applications. I'm sure of it. So the after the date segment, find my zombie. That's right. Find my zombie.
00:01:43
Speaker
Uh, all right.
Shift in Focus: Tech Talk
00:01:45
Speaker
So we had to sort of pivot for this podcast because our recording we were supposed to do yesterday with a guest, the guest had extenuating circumstances come up that day and had to back out. So Paul and I delayed our recording by a day and we went to the essay website and the advances in archeological practice, which I hadn't really looked at for the most recent issue, which came out in February of 2020.
00:02:06
Speaker
And we found some pretty decent articles to talk about. And we're also going to discuss some new tech that I got actually for my birthday about 10 days ago. And a couple apps associated with that that I think have some pretty promising applications for archaeology. So let's talk about this first one.
Challenges in LiDAR Mapping
00:02:22
Speaker
So this is from Advances and Archaeological Practice from February of 2020. And the article's entitled, Testing Web Mapping and Active Learning to Approach LIDAR Data.
00:02:32
Speaker
and it was written by Marion Forrest, Laurent Costa, Andy Comby, Antoine Dorison, and Gregory Peiria. I'm pronouncing those all wrong, sorry guys. We will include this article in the show notes, so go there and check it out, and you can find it. There will be a PDF of the article.
00:02:52
Speaker
So the quick and dirty of this thing is these guys did a LIDAR survey of 91 square kilometers of the Zacapu region of West Mexico. And one of the biggest problems that they encountered with this is the sheer volume of data was massive. It was like, how the heck do we even look at all this? It was like, this is great. We have all these data, but we don't even know how to deal with it, right? And some of those problems were resulting around
00:03:18
Speaker
First off, how do you map this whole thing? How do you not only get it on a map and associate it with the surrounding context, but then have people look at it? They call it desk-based feature interpretation, but how do you train people to look at this system in basically ArcGIS or Esri-based system that is essentially proprietary and difficult to get many licenses for?
Web-based Platforms for LiDAR
00:03:41
Speaker
So you have to train a whole bunch of people if you're going to go through these data and not spend an entire career doing it. But how do you do that? How do you get a system where more than a few people can easily come in, take a look at the data, and then you have an easy system for, or at least easier system for training them how to actually see archaeological features. So basically, the article is about their process of creating a web-based mapping platform that just about anybody could go in and use. It's still proprietary, but it's way more accessible than Esri.
00:04:11
Speaker
and anybody could go in there and take a look at it and then
00:04:15
Speaker
also teach people how to basically observe and interpret archeological features. Maybe not interpret, that's probably going a little too far, but at least identify archeological features because it's surprisingly hard to teach a computer how to do that. We can see a square in a LiDAR image pretty easily as humans, but it's hard for a computer to see that because while we see pretty well-defined edges, we've had a lot of training on how to define squares over our years.
00:04:42
Speaker
So we're basically, we're basically like AI systems where it's just, you know, uh, we've crowdsourced our own information and we know what a square looks like. So we can see that we know what a straight line looks like. We know what non-natural features look like in general.
00:04:55
Speaker
But again, computers are basically infants until we teach them how to learn those things.
Human vs Computer: Data Interpretation
00:05:01
Speaker
And the machine learning algorithms is the word I'm trying to think of. We're basically machine learning algorithms. That's what our brains are. And we spend an entire lifetime doing machine learning and taking all those data and then being able to understand how those things work. But again, very hard for computers to do that, especially with LiDAR data, because it's so fluffy, for lack of a better word.
00:05:22
Speaker
It's not very well defined. It looks like it to us because again, we're excellent pattern recognition machines, but it's really difficult to teach a computer that. So figuring out how to do all this and how to teach people how to do this, basically the context of the article. Paul, any initial thoughts on this article you want to bring up? Yeah. I mean, I was thinking just the very first problem that they outlined right up there in the abstract is like you said, it's the sheer volume of data that they have to deal with.
00:05:50
Speaker
That is one of the issues that we have in archaeological projects in general, but definitely as we go into more computerized and electronic kinds of data collection is that we have this incredible ability to
00:06:05
Speaker
to gather data, and then what do
Data Volume Challenges
00:06:08
Speaker
we do with it? It becomes then a problem of analysis, it becomes a problem of storage. And they're definitely worried about the problem of analysis here, and so that's where the whole second part is about the training. I don't think that this is a bad thing, generating too much data. In our daily lives, we all feel overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that is out there that we can know and learn and things that we don't know.
00:06:31
Speaker
Within our own field, this has been a problem forever though. One of my professors did some very seminal excavations in Iraq and never properly published his data. So that well predates computers in our field. And now we're just doing more of that. Hopefully not as drastically badly as that, but yeah.
00:06:56
Speaker
it is an ongoing problem, one that we've all been faced with and one that we all either are grappling with or kicking that can down the road to deal with later. So it's nice to see that they lead out with that as the problem that they're trying to tackle in this article.
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah. And just so we get the information out there too, cause I think this is pretty neat.
Tools: DynMap and Hoomanoom
00:07:15
Speaker
You can't actually, apparently you can actually click in and see their system. It's not just like open to the world for obvious reasons, but they were able to use basically different access levels for different people. And I'll talk about that in a second, but the system they used is something I hadn't really heard of before called, I'm sure it's pronounced dine map, not did map D Y N M A P.
00:07:35
Speaker
and MAP is an acronym. So DynMap, I'm going to call it, which is open source code. And then they stored the map that they created in that whole system on what is called the Hoomanoom, and that's H-U-M-A dash N-U-M, research infrastructure server. And again, something I hadn't heard of before.
00:07:55
Speaker
They said the platform uses a MySQL database, large data storage and management of spatial data. So that was the interface that they used. Now, also, they said that they were able to have some people with administrator level access, which is great, which enabled the addition and deletion of shapes and rasters.
00:08:11
Speaker
while volunteer students had editor-level access. And they were able to, according to the article here, manually extract features using a set of shapefiles that were pre-integrated. So different shapefiles that represent different types of features that they were actually specifically looking for, from pyramids to walls, room buildings, linear features, stuff like that.
00:08:31
Speaker
So anyway, super cool. And it looks like the students were just essentially using these different types of like, it sounds like they would choose the type of shape they wanted to draw. And then they would draw that on this basically rudimentary GIS interface. And you didn't need any special knowledge or tools to be able to do that. You just choose the right one. I mean, if it's a line, choose the line. If it's a point, choose a point. If it's a polygon, choose the polygon.
00:08:52
Speaker
and go from there. But it sounds like they had those, let's say the polyline was split up into pyramids and mounds and room buildings, if you could recognize those as such, and then you could further define that for the dataset, which is super cool. That seems like something that's really easy to teach somebody how to do and pretty great. I've personally always thought that
00:09:13
Speaker
you know, large, large scale survey, at least from an initial standpoint, but large scale survey using whatever method is appropriate for the
LiDAR Technology Explained
00:09:22
Speaker
project. In this case, down in the jungle, LIDAR, which we we've talked about occasionally, but basically stands for light detection and ranging. And it's basically using lasers to map. And the nice thing about LIDAR and the way that it works, lasers are super fine, right? They've got a super tight resolution and they pulse. I don't know how many times it actually mentions it in the article here, but it pulses
00:09:43
Speaker
These are pulses, roughly 1.17 returns per pulse on average, 10.4 pulses per meter squared, blah, blah, blah. Where's the numbers here? Where's the numbers? Anyway, they really have a whole bunch of great numbers in here on the type of aircraft, the altitudes that were flying, scan angle was 30 degrees, scan frequency of 20 Hertz, the process point cloud yielded 1.1,
00:10:07
Speaker
billion returns from 0.945 billion laser pulses. And again, with the speed the aircraft was flying, that was apparently 1.17 returns per pulse. So that's amazing. I mean, that is huge. And the reason why LIDAR can see through vegetation essentially is we look at vegetation and we say, you know, if you look at a jungle from the sky, you're like, I can't see anything. It's a jungle, right?
00:10:30
Speaker
But a laser looks at it and says, I can get through that. And it just, it cuts through the vegetation because the aircraft is flying and it's flying with a laser as a scan angle, like it said here, of 30 degrees. It's pulsing so quickly that it is able to actually just get through everything. And lasers can, if I'm not mistaken, see through some kinds of leaves, like physically laser through the leaves and get a return back through them. Some thicker ones probably not, but it can actually do that. And so what you get
00:10:57
Speaker
is essentially a soft edge map of the ground surface through dense jungle. And that's how they're able to find these things. But to get back to my point, large scale survey using whatever method is necessary. Again, in the jungle, you want to use LIDAR out in here in the Great Basin or in the Eastern Mojave of California. You could get away with using a drone based photogrammetry and then some other machine learning techniques, but you know, whatever's required.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, right. So with these LiDAR data sets, what you end up with are the laser shot down, and most of it bounces back up off the canopy, you know, off the uppermost leaves of the canopy. But some of them manage to find their way through because they're shooting so many different laser pulses. And those ones that find their way through them bounce off the whatever surfaces down below, the ground surface typically.
00:11:45
Speaker
So if you were to slice that cloud of returns vertically so that you could see it, you would see one layer that's the ground layer and another one that's up on top there that's the canopy. And so they throw down so many laser pulses that they get enough return that you can get a decent resolution, both of the canopy, which doesn't interest us so much, but definitely the ground surface, which as archaeologists is what interests us. I was thinking though,
00:12:10
Speaker
There's a huge amount of data, but also maybe a little misleading because when I was talking about data before, I was thinking more like site records and object cards and things like that. This is more analogous to pixels in an image.
00:12:26
Speaker
where each one is a data point. It's a datum. And in aggregate, you're looking at millions of billions of data points, but it's not like dealing with a billion object cards. That's something totally different. It's a different kind of data. It's much more like looking at large images, raster images that we're all used to looking at.
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, I just, I can't get over the amount of how quickly you can get that much data. I mean, 91 square kilometers being flown by a Piper chieftain, it says, um, which is a, you know, decent size aircraft. And, and I think flying 700 meters, 900 meters and 1,100 meters above ground level with different configurations for each. So they must have compiled all those into one. And like you said, they were able to just extract these different layers and, and get it out.
00:13:18
Speaker
You know, more to my point about large-scale survey in general and why this paper really gives us a good model for how this could be done and interpreted, budgets are always a problem. And the reason a lot of people won't fly a LIDAR like this, or they won't fly a
00:13:37
Speaker
drone or even an aircraft to do large-scale photogrammetry in a place with very little vegetation like out in the desert. The reason for that is it's expensive. Drones are cheaper, but they cover way less area, so it's going to take you a lot longer. If you could fly a photogrammetry mission with an aircraft, that'd be great.
00:13:54
Speaker
But airplanes are expensive because they require pilots. They require someone to operate the device unless you can automate that somehow and you just need to pilot. But airplanes are expensive and the insurance requirements and all that. I don't know what it costs them to do it down in Mexico, but I know up here in the States, it's not cheap to hire somebody to do that.
00:14:14
Speaker
If you could blow a lot of your budget on getting that done and getting it done in a day or a couple days, and you finish all your survey, and then you can pop all this into an online web mapping system and crowdsource people into it without actually releasing what the... If you're zoomed in close enough like the
00:14:32
Speaker
What is it called? The Geo Explorer program that Sarah Parkak set up to find looting across the world. You're zoomed in so far, you have no idea where on the planet you are, right? And that's how they keep these sites secret basically. They keep these areas secret, but people are looking at different areas where the satellite has identified possible looting and they teach you how to see
Crowdsourcing in Archaeology
00:14:50
Speaker
the signs of looting and you just mark, yes, looting, yes, looting, yes, looting, or no looting.
00:14:53
Speaker
And it'd be the same thing here. You teach people, hey, you're looking for these three basic things or something like that. And that's all I want you to call out. And then when you crowdsource it, you tell the computer, hey, when 30 people or 100 people or however big your crowd is, when they all agree that it's the same thing, then we'll put that in the yes column and have a quote professional take a look at it or something like that. That way they don't have to look at 91 square kilometers of data. They just have to look at
00:15:20
Speaker
maybe a few hundred points of interest, right? And they go straight to it. Well, to your point about the expense of this, a lot of the interesting LiDAR projects I've seen lately published are actually using publicly available data. So governments, whether they're federal governments or regional governments, regional bodies, bodies within a government that are in charge of monitoring waterways in particular.
00:15:46
Speaker
have done a lot of LiDAR surveys and then have recently made some of those data sets available to the public. So that initial hurdle of cost, depending on what your project is, might be reduced right down to almost nothing because it's basically paid four out of tax dollars.
00:16:03
Speaker
Yeah, that reminds me, I was talking to my GIS guy one time a few years ago and he mentioned that, cause he lives up in Virginia city, Nevada, which is kind of up in the hills here at South, uh, Southeast Reno. But he's done a lot of work up and around like Tahoe, which is again, only about 30, 40 minutes from here.
00:16:19
Speaker
And apparently, and I don't know, Lake Tahoe is split right down the middle. Well, not really right down the middle. California has more than Nevada, but it's about, California has about two thirds of Lake Tahoe and Nevada has about a third of it, give or take. And at least on the Nevada side and the whole hillside of the Sierra Nevadas that are east facing that we can see here from Reno and from Carson City, Nevada there.
00:16:41
Speaker
They've done high resolution aircraft-based photogrammetry surveys that are available to the public, just like you're saying. I've never looked it up, but he was saying he uses it all the time for doing basically pre-research kind of things and seeing stuff. And it's really high resolution. You can move around it. They've already done all the work to it to produce photogrammetry models, but you can also get the raw images and do your own things to them. And it's just fantastic. And again, paid for by tax dollars and available to the public. So that's pretty cool.
00:17:10
Speaker
This is also a good point to take a break real quick and when we come back we will wrap up talking about this article. See you on the other side. Chris Webster here for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R.
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00:18:40
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 127 of the archaeotech podcast. And we are talking about an article in the recent edition of, and recent by our standards, February 2020 of the Advances in Archaeological Practice from the Society for American Archaeology. And it's called Testing Web Mapping and Active Learning to Approach Lidar Data. Take a look at that in our show notes for this episode at arcpodnet.com forward slash
00:19:07
Speaker
You can also look at the podcast player right in your hands there and they'll have a link right to it.
00:19:12
Speaker
Okay, so we've been talking about this article and so now we want to shift into kind of a training mode because that was one of the other big goals that they had was teaching people how best to do this because one of the problems they identified was very few archaeologists actually know how to interpret LiDAR data. You'd think it'd be easy. I mean, I have never been trained to interpret LiDAR data, but I've seen plenty of it. And I think just by looking at it, I could be like, listen, if I know what kind of features are expected in the area,
00:19:40
Speaker
I can probably know what to look for based on the landforms and what is different, but I know how I can understand how it could be difficult in areas with maybe a lot of surface bedrock and things like that because nature can produce a lot of shapes and things that look like they're man-made. If you don't really know what you're looking for, you could actually find things or identify things that are natural and maybe that's just
00:20:04
Speaker
You know, there's going to be an error percentage in that anyway, right? You're just going to find some things and some things are going to be identified by multiple people that probably are natural and you'll have to ground truth those eventually. But the hope is with training, there'll be fewer of those and they've got some pretty good images here. There's one, especially if you're following along in the article on page 31.
00:20:22
Speaker
that has three images. One is just an aerial view. One is a hillshade analysis based off that. And then another one is the slope analysis. And you can really see how these different things show different images of the landscape, the same configuration showing different images in the landscape and the same scale and everything. And it's pretty amazing. I mean, this settlement just pops, whereas in the aerial view,
00:20:45
Speaker
it looks like a few modern roads and that's it. And you can't really see anything. So again, back to the training standpoint, one comment that I'd like to make, because again, this is referencing, I think they even mentioned this in the abstract, but they definitely mentioned in the beginning, is that most archaeologists are not trained to do this. And I don't know how many times we hear that. You know, archaeologists aren't trained to do this. Archaeologists aren't trained to do that. What the hell are we training archaeologists to do? You know what I mean? If it's all theory,
00:21:14
Speaker
We need more people to understand how to collect and analyze the data before they can get into the theory on the data. It's becoming more and more of a problem. I know when I was in school for my anthropology degree from 2000, 2001 or whatever it was to 2005,
00:21:33
Speaker
I mean, most of the people in my class, I wouldn't say all of them, but definitely a lot of the people in my classes in a small school, but a lot of people in my classes were very much in the, how should I say, uh, tech adverse sector, right? They were just, you know, they, they didn't bring computers to class. I mean, smartphones weren't really that popular at the time. I don't even think they were invented at the time, to be honest, but yeah, the iPhone came out in 2007.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, well, there you go. So, uh, but still people were basically fairly tech averse. And I find that still today with people and trying to get them to use wild note and other things, um, out in the field and you just run into.
00:22:08
Speaker
you know, wall after wall after wall of people saying, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to
Tech Adoption in Archaeology
00:22:12
Speaker
do that. I don't like it. I don't understand it. But some things have taken hold like GIS. We can't do our jobs today without GIS. We can't do our jobs without GPSs at the very least, you know, just your standard garments. But and you know, at another level, like a sub meter GPS, like a tremble or something like that.
00:22:27
Speaker
So those have become more standard, but it's taken decades for that to happen. And it just makes me wonder if we shouldn't be recruiting and emphasizing a different type of person that is going to be interested in archaeology of the future, because this kind of stuff is going to be how we're going to do archaeological survey, you know, just building on the last segment. It was like,
00:22:47
Speaker
large scale aerial survey with high tech equipment and then being able to analyze those things. And then as the very last step, ground truthing it as an archeologist, and then that's just the last step of the field work. Then you got to get into analysis and interpretation and maybe that's two different kinds of archeologists. I don't know, but that's definitely a problem that, that we have in this field.
00:23:06
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't been active enough in the field recently to know if that's peculiar about where you're doing your work and who you've been running into. It wasn't really so much my experience as a grad student, but that was a while ago now and I tended to be easy. I was in the
00:23:21
Speaker
tech wing of the museum. So I was surrounded by people who are in one way or another drawn to tech. And so I kind of wonder, and this is just amusing. I don't know if this is true or not. And if anybody wanted to chime in and correct me, I'd be absolutely open ears is that I wonder if what we saw is the people who are using computers and various kinds of computerized mapping and the like databases and everything.
00:23:48
Speaker
in the, starting in the late 80s, maybe, I mean, I know it goes back earlier in our field, but at the point that it becomes a matter of things that people could do on reasonably inexpensive machines. So 80s, 90s, if those of us were the kind of the tech hobbyists, people more like you and me, the ones who are just inherently attracted to tech, and now we're running to the backside of a slope where people are becoming less,
00:24:15
Speaker
less afraid of tech, it just becomes kind of the go-to. You might not know the exact tool to use. Actually, our last interview was a great example.
00:24:23
Speaker
where he was using Photoshop to look at images until he realized that he really should be using GIS. But even using Photoshop shows that he gravitated toward doing something with the computer first. So I wonder if there was maybe a gap in there early 2000s would fit right with what you were talking about between where there were the hobbyists, the people with tech affinities
00:24:48
Speaker
in the field. And now people were, for whom it's just, yeah, what you do. And in between there was a gap, maybe even a backlash against such things. I don't know. That's just kind of idle musing. And again, if anybody could enlighten me one way or the other, that would be great to hear. But do you think there's any kind of truth to that? Or is that me just making something up out of a whole cloth right now?
00:25:11
Speaker
No, I think you're right. And just thinking about my own field of serum archaeology, and I'm glad you brought up the difference, because there definitely is a difference in the academic side of things. Because the whole concept behind getting a PhD is original research. So one of the ways to be original in the last two decades, three or four decades, really, is to honestly use something a little more high tech that's a different approach and then write about it, right? Yeah, that's true. And then produce something that's
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's talking about that. And that's not going to stop anytime soon. I mean, technology is constantly, constantly evolving and changing, which is a good thing for us, but it's constantly evolving and changing. So you could probably write a LIDAR based PhD every single year for the next 10 years and have different things to say about it, right? It just, it's making me wonder if the field of say CRM archaeology can really handle
00:26:04
Speaker
I guess I don't know how to say it, but we can really handle two different types of archaeologists. Because if we got to a point where the standard really was large-scale field survey through some sort of remote means, even if those remote means are piloted or operated by an operator, it's still not doing field survey, not initial field survey. But then you have the people
00:26:26
Speaker
that do go out. So you have the operators, which don't necessarily need to be archaeologists, but you have operators. And now then you have the people that are going to ground truth. So those are going to be field archaeologists that are out there, understand, recognize, understand how to recognize the features of the region area that they're working in. And then you might have the people that are actually doing the right up at interpretation and really getting into the theory and evaluation type of things.
00:26:49
Speaker
Should those be three separate people right now? It's kind of like one person does all that right one type of person does all that and and and archaeology in General as a field seems to be okay with that they seem to be alright with Just doing all facets
Role Specialization in Archaeology?
00:27:04
Speaker
of the business. I mean we still have people who are more into report writing and people who are more into field work but it's
00:27:11
Speaker
It's an interesting situation. And again, I'm just not sure with so few people actually in this field that we can really support two different types because I mean, right now you can't even fill in our key. You can't even fill an anthropology classroom, right? I mean, there might be 20 people in there versus say physics or something like that where there's a hundred people in there and it's, uh, uh, it's getting more and more difficult. And, and I don't think the,
00:27:34
Speaker
the teaching infrastructure is really even there to get on board with really these high level things that I think people should be learning in college in their undergrad, not necessarily graduate school, but in their undergrad, they should be learning all about this stuff and not as an intro class that says, Hey, here's a few different survey methods. Here's, you know, bang Lidar. I think I was, I don't even know if I heard about Lidar when I was in my undergrad, but if I did, it was probably a bullet point on a slide, right? When really Lidar and other stuff that was available 15 years ago, 20 years ago should have been
00:28:05
Speaker
something more talked about, right? Something more cutting edge. But as archeologists, we're always just concerned with what are the end results? You know, what is the theory? What is the, what were these people actually doing? And I understand that that's why we're doing this, but we can't get to that point without understanding the tools it takes to get there. And the more, the more we rely on other people to do that for us, other experts in other fields to gather and collect those data, the more we're, you know,
00:28:32
Speaker
left out of the picture, left out of the planning. Yeah. And back to the theory, you left out of the planning and that's going to sway your results. Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, I'm very encouraged by articles like this where they decide to invent something, but we've seen a few now in the last few years.
00:28:50
Speaker
things where people are using either some version of crowdsourcing, even if the crowd is students that they created and then not real crowds like open to the world. We've seen stuff like that. We've seen different machine learning algorithms come around. One of the things they mentioned here was one of the problems that they saw was
00:29:11
Speaker
There's lots of different source articles that they found of people doing a very similar thing, but creating it from scratch, right? Just creating something from scratch. We still haven't gotten to the point where an archeologist can say, I have a data set, where do I plug this in? You know, it's still people, generally grad students that are creating something. And my question is, are they creating it so they can say they're doing something original because they want to do something original because that's what they're being told from the get-go?
00:29:40
Speaker
Listen, you have to come up with something that nobody's ever seen before. So rather than using existing tools, they're coming up with new tools. Or is it just that they're not being exposed? Their research isn't showing them something that is built or somebody hasn't built something you can buy or rent or lease or use off the shelf where you can just plug these in. Or is it a problem with the data? Do we have
00:30:03
Speaker
too much variability in the types of features that you would see in, let's say, LiDAR data, LiDAR mapping data from around the world. If you mapped 100 different places with LiDAR data, could you actually plug that into one system and pull out a bunch of features? Or are humans in geography too unpredictable? I don't know. I don't know the answers to those questions. But I feel like we could come up with a
00:30:26
Speaker
a single tool or a single set of tools for each type of data collection method where you could just plug it in, say, here are my variables. Here's what I expect to see. Spit out an answer on the other end. I don't know. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. Let's see where to start. To a certain extent, what you're talking about are expert systems and machine learning and
00:30:57
Speaker
I definitely, well, I would see the potential as it sounds softer than what I mean to be. I definitely see the value in, you know, I definitely see that this is where things are going to go. I just, I don't see the path necessarily always. It's, it's one of those things that's easy to say and kind of easy to envision, but to envision how to actually make it happen, you know, how to, how to put all the pieces together to make it work like that is where I draw a blank. So I'm, I just have to leave that to people smarter than I am.
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah, me too. But the training that they talk about in the article, the training for the students, that's certainly a practical way that you can deal with right here and right now. And we interviewed last year Parker Van Falkenberg, who was amongst the project. They were classifying ceramics. And so in order to speed it up, they were experimenting with different ways of how they could train people and how they could do some tandem, two people working together in certain situations. And they were actually looking at the
00:31:55
Speaker
analyzing how their training went in addition to analyzing how the tool went and I think that's a good approach that we should be using more and it will help inform any of those kinds of expert systems is how do you train people and I think that you can adapt that to how you train computers so that you don't have to train the people as much. Does that make sense?
00:32:15
Speaker
That does make sense. And I think that nails it. I think that is the end goal that we're looking for here is something where you can download something like QGIS or something like that was an open source GIS system, and then plug in a set of variables, create the framework that you can download from somewhere that's also open source, and then upload your dataset to that and then just have it punch it out without having people crowdsource it. I think crowdsourcing is just
00:32:43
Speaker
the way that we're going to end up training the computers, to be honest. I'd like to see, because I've talked about this on the show too, as my kind of go-to for crowdsourcing, which is one of the first things I ever heard of from a crowdsourcing data analysis standpoint was Galaxy Zoo.
00:32:59
Speaker
And again, I haven't looked that up in years, but Galaxy Zoo was a platform you could log into and the basic premise was it's hard to teach computers how to identify the shapes of galaxies and we understand things about galaxies based on their shapes. So are they circular? Are they elliptical?
00:33:15
Speaker
There was one other shape that I'm trying to think of, what were they normally? Circular, elliptical, and there was something else. Spiral, something like that, yeah. But apparently it's really hard to show an image of galaxies to a computer and say, sort these for me. But what was easy to do, because all these galaxies are surrounded by empty blackness, so it was easy for a computer to say, well, let me identify these individual galaxies. And then they showed those to people. And all you did was you clicked on which
Tech's Role in Data Interpretation
00:33:42
Speaker
one it was. And when they hit a certain number,
00:33:44
Speaker
then that one was marked as good and it wasn't shown to anybody anymore and was sent off to an astronomer probably to just verify and to me that's just teaching the computer i hope they took those data sets and they just taught the computer so the end goal is exactly what you said we don't really have to worry about training we just have to worry about.
00:33:59
Speaker
really efficient data collection and making sure you get the right inputs so the computer can give you the right outputs. Some people might think it takes the archaeologist out of the archaeology, but I think it takes a lot of data to get to that point and it allows us to take smaller and smaller budgets.
00:34:21
Speaker
and put them towards more analysis and more output. More papers, more books, more talks, more websites, more things like that, rather than spending all your hours on just pure analysis when you could just have a computer spit all that out for you. But we have to get to the point where we can trust that.
00:34:38
Speaker
push back a little bit on what you're saying here, you're using the word analysis, but the way that you're using it is more just like identification, right? I suppose so. And so I think that maybe it pushes the archeologist job of analysis to deeper questions or more human-centric questions rather than just, you know, is this an artifact? Is this a site? The identification ones that are going to be the easier ones for the computers to tackle earlier. Right. Yeah, good point.
00:35:05
Speaker
Okay, well, we actually had like four articles we were gonna possibly talk about in this, but of course we spent two whole segments talking about one article, which is great. Maybe we can, and we've got a couple holes in our schedule too. So if you're listening to this in real time, head over to arkpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech. And on the sidebar, you'll see a little link that says schedule an interview. And we record every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. So if that time works out for you,
00:35:33
Speaker
Go ahead and pick one because we have we have some interviews coming up. I think in the end of May and early June of 2020 here, but we do have some holes in our schedule coming up. So take a look at those. Otherwise, I'm going to try to fill those by taking a look at some of those other articles and maybe contact some of the authors. Either way, if we can't get the authors on, then I'm sure Paul and I can can riff on it for you. So
00:35:55
Speaker
We've somewhat, I don't want to say abandon the app of the day segment, but we've abandoned it as a regular feature just because we're running out of apps. However, I recently received a piece of tech that I think could be pretty advantageous for archeology. I've talked about it on some of their shows and there are some pretty cool apps that go along with it. So we'll talk about that in the next segment. Back in a second.
00:36:18
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:36:37
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the Archeotech podcast, episode 127.
Tech Gadgets: Bose Frames
00:36:40
Speaker
And we're gonna shift gears right now and talk about a piece of tech that I received about 10 days ago for my birthday from my wife. And I had seen these, it's the Bose Frames, go look them up. We'll have a link in the show notes. So look them up so you can understand what I'm talking about. But basically I had seen a review of these months ago by somebody who got some tech reviewer that got an advanced copy or an advanced model and was taking a look at it.
00:37:05
Speaker
And I looked at them and I thought they were cool and I didn't really think much more of it because they didn't really study it that much. They were just, they was a favorable review. They thought it was good. And then she just randomly picked these up for me. So I was like, wow, fantastic. So I'll first describe what they are. They're basically 1980 style Ray-Ban sunglasses, except they're both sunglasses. And you can get different lenses for them, which is super cool. They've got
00:37:29
Speaker
built-in UVA, UVB, light blocking lenses, but then you can also get polarized lenses, you can get prescription lenses, so they must pop out pretty easily, although I haven't done it with these. And also, I thought, when I was just initially seeing these, because I wasn't really paying attention, I thought they were the bone conduction style of audio interface, which that came out, god, probably eight, 10 years ago. I remember these bone conduction headphones came out that kind of wrapped around the back of your head,
00:37:57
Speaker
and they contacted right behind your ear and basically used vibration to convert to audio into your skull, essentially. And the advantage to that, it was built towards runners and cyclists and things like that. The advantage to that was you could listen to whatever you're listening to and still have your ears open to the world outside, right? So you're not too isolated when a car horn is about to, you know, a car is about to run you over or something like that.
00:38:26
Speaker
So that's what I thought it was, but it's not. It's actually got a pretty good sized hefty arm on both sides. And there are three speakers, three directional speakers on each one.
00:38:40
Speaker
And they're surprisingly good. Now, just like wearing regular headphones and cranking them up all the way, people can still hear audio if they're standing there. If you've got it down kind of a ways, the volume may be under like 50%, somebody standing next to you is going to have a hard time hearing that you're actually listening to something. But that being said, it's still pretty quiet for you too. So, you know, it's not like you're,
00:39:01
Speaker
in your own private world, uh, listening to this thing, you're still going to be here in the outside world. And if it's a windy environment, you're going to have to have them turn up higher, you know, so on and so forth. And the other thing is they're surprisingly light. Uh, they're a lot lighter than I expected them to be. They're not as light obviously as a regular pair of sunglasses because they got two batteries inside of them, but they are surprisingly light and they're, they're light considering the tech that's in here. So they've got gold plated hinges on the frames to the arm, to the arms. And then there's a,
00:39:31
Speaker
a shockingly proprietary plug that's kind of magnetized onto the side of the inside frame here to charge them. And I say shockingly proprietary because there's literally nothing that looks like this. If you lose that, you're going to have to buy another one from Bose. I mean, there's no other way to hook power into these. So definitely keep track of that. And then there's also
00:39:50
Speaker
motion sensors inside of here, which allows for a couple of different cool features. So one of them is the, I'll talk about the Bose AR in a second. That's the other, that's the one. But one of them is there's a button on the right side frame up near the eyepiece where it hinges that basically allows you to control everything about these sunglasses. So when you put them on, you push that front, you push that button and it connects to your phone or whatever you're hooking to, usually a phone. So it'll connect to anything with Bluetooth though. So it connects to that.
00:40:19
Speaker
And then you have the same typical controls as any single push button headphone device, like your AirPods or whatever is basically one button to play pause, two taps to advance to the next track, three traps to go back. You can tap the button to accept a phone call. There is a microphone in here. The one person I've talked to on these said that it doesn't sound great, which doesn't surprise me.
00:40:39
Speaker
I would use it as, you know, your long time device. But if you had to accept a phone call on this, you could do that. Another cool feature is when you hold down on the button and turn your head to the right, it increases the volume. When you hold down the button, turn your head to the left, it decreases the volume, which is super cool. And then finally, when you pull the sunglasses off and you flip them upside down and lay them on the table like a lot of people do when they pull glasses off, it disconnects them from your phone and shuts them off. So that's also a pretty neat feature.
00:41:10
Speaker
Paul, you're looking at these on the web here. Also, they're $200 without any sort of lens change. I think they're like $199 or something like that, which is pretty standard for, I would say, a pair of either high-end sunglasses or nice headphones. This is a combination of both. Well, I wouldn't say they're nice headphones. That's the one thing I'll mention.
00:41:28
Speaker
When you get up over, I'm just guessing here, just based on my own use of these over the last two weeks, when you get over maybe 60 or 70% on the volume level, it starts to really distort the highs and the lows. But around 50 or 60%, this has a surprisingly good tonal quality to it for music.
00:41:47
Speaker
Perfect for podcasts at pretty much any volume. But if you're listening to music on it, it really starts to distort on the high ends of the volume and not that high end either. Like I said, probably around 70%. And then right around the mid range, it sounds really, really good. I mean, it's still open ear headphones, so it's not going to sound like the pair, the cans that I'm wearing now, the QuietComfort Plus.
00:42:08
Speaker
I mean, for something that is essentially a pair of sunglasses and you're able to hear everything around you, it's surprisingly good and I'm very impressed by the sound quality.
00:42:18
Speaker
Anyway, what's your initial impression of these before I really get into some of the other stuff, just looking at them online? Well, I'm going to tell people that, uh, you know, we were talking about this beforehand, um, you know, off air before we started recording today and, uh, immediately the two of us went off to, Hey, how could he actually use this? Does this have any kind of logical purpose? Well, I didn't have any initial impression of it. I, I, you told me about it. I looked down like, okay, uh, I don't wear sunglasses, so it's not going to affect me very much. If they make reading glasses like that, then
00:42:49
Speaker
And I'll be okay. We started talking about archaeological applications for it. And there was, I guess, an app that you found to bring this back to almost the app of the day segment that you that
00:43:00
Speaker
got thinking about what we could do with these or something like them in the future. Actually in the product. Right. So well, you could probably do it right now. Yeah. So there's a, there's a certain class of Bose products, Bose audio products, and there's only a handful of them that are augmented reality enabled for the Bose AR system. Right.
Bose AR in Fieldwork
00:43:21
Speaker
And one of them is the headphones I'm wearing now, which is again, the quiet, I think it's a quiet comfort to
00:43:26
Speaker
whatever it is. But anyway, they're the wireless headphones and not every single product has this. So to be AR, one of the things it has to have is motion sensors inside of it. So it knows what direction you're facing, right? It doesn't really know north, south, east, west, although actually
00:43:42
Speaker
Now that I'm thinking about, that's actually not true. It actually does know North, South, East, West, because I took these headphones and again, through the Bose Connect app, it links you into a sort of an AR app store, which just links you to either Google or Apple's app stores. So you can actually download the application. But one of the ones I saw in there, and there's not very many. So I don't know if people just aren't seeing the application of this because it's really only for Bose AR products. But again, there's not very many, but one of the ones that I did find was called Microsoft Soundscapes.
00:44:12
Speaker
And this is free, totally free, and it's basically a mapping application without a map. I've never seen that before, but there's no map inside this whatsoever. And what you do is, I'm looking at it right now, and after you set up your bro's frames, and again, this is what tells me that there's actually a compass inside it. They're not just a motion sensor.
00:44:32
Speaker
is you have to basically roll the, roll the, um, both frames around, roll the sunglasses around. So it goes through the, you know, goes through the earth's magnetic field a few times and then kind of orient itself to where it's at. Just like you would do a drone. A lot of times you have to spin your drones around and several axes. It didn't tell me to spin it in any sort of axes. It just said, kind of shake them around a little bit. And then it set itself. And then
00:44:59
Speaker
I know, right? And then once you do that, you can set an audio beacon. And basically, it's got two ways of doing that. You can either just pick from a list of places around you, restaurants, points of interest, whatever it is, you can filter that a little bit. Not too good, to be honest. But you can also just set an address in.
00:45:16
Speaker
I can't, I haven't seen where you can set in like a latitude and longitude. I haven't actually tried that, but you can set in an address. So what it does after that is it, is it, it will give you audible in his British, this British voice, but we'll give you audible cues and directions and things around you just to be aware of. But again, not a mapping application. It's really just a directional guide and it, and it has these different beeping tones on the left or right side, or even confusingly behind you. It can make it sound like it's actually behind you.
00:45:45
Speaker
But the direction you're hearing the tone from is the direction that your audio beacon is or the direction you're going.
00:45:52
Speaker
your destination. And then when you're pointing straight at it, and I don't know what the field of view is, whether you have to be within 20 degrees, 10 degrees, 30 degrees, I don't know. But when you're pointing straight at the audio beacon that you set, you get a different tone. So you know you're going in the right direction. And they basically say, listen, you can do one of two things. You can just use those cues and get to where you're going any way that you can. So if you're not too worried about the path for me to be,
00:46:16
Speaker
but just that you're generally going in the right direction, then great. But if you are concerned with that, you can use these, but you can also use another mapping application so you can do turn by turn or take a look at a map or whatever, but you'll still have the audible signals in your sunglasses.
00:46:33
Speaker
So that is pretty cool. And what we were talking about beforehand was basically, hell, why can't I develop an app that uses this Bose AR kit and maybe actually have a map down on there. And if I have to walk a transect of say 150 degrees, and I know my endpoint on that transect is a road or a fence line or something else I can see on a map,
00:46:54
Speaker
then I can just drop a point right there and walk towards that point. And the system would tell me, you know, there's a lot of times when you have to stop and record a site or stop and do a shovel test or something like that. It would tell me when I get back online, hey, I'm actually generally focusing in the right direction, something like that. Or conversely, just transiting to any point. You know, a lot of times we have to go find sites that we either did a flag and run on when we were doing surveys. We got to go out and record it, but we got to just walk straight to the point.
00:47:22
Speaker
or you're looking for a previously recorded site, in which case you're also walking straight towards a point. I don't know, lots of applications. And again, you're not carrying around extra gear. It's literally in your sunglasses, which is crazy cool. I don't know. No, I mean, that's what we were talking about. This here is one of those technologies that you could really see very easily be adopted by a typical archaeological kit. Maybe not necessarily these specific ones, AR, audible AR in general.
00:47:52
Speaker
One of the first cool things I saw when we started playing around with them with VR when it you know with the Google Cardboard when it started becoming popular and very cheap easily accessible were different Different movies one of the questions that people had about like how do you do a movie in full 3d? fully immersive 3d
00:48:10
Speaker
And one of the things that got keyed on pretty quickly as well, you know, you're going to want, you know, as opposed to a regular film where the, uh, the filmmaker has full control over what you're seeing. Well, within limits, but they definitely, they're pointing your attention in the right direction. Uh, in VR, you don't have that.
00:48:28
Speaker
So, settle on using audio cues and this works really effectively on scary kinds of VR experiences where there's something bad going to happen and you start to hear that creepy noise off behind you to the left and your reaction is to turn that direction to look and then the jump scare happens.
00:48:50
Speaker
So it's not a brand new idea. It's been used and it's been used pretty effectively for entertainment, but it seems like it could also be used quite easily then for scientific or cultural applications. I was thinking you were talking about going and finding a site. I could also see it being a specific kind of an audio guide that you use when you go visit a site.
00:49:13
Speaker
You know, can you imagine, again, I like mentioning Chaco Canyon because I like the scale of it, but can you imagine walking around there and you key in, you know, Pueblo Bonito and you go walk around it and it keys in and you could, I'm sure, have other audio. Actually, didn't we look at, oh, I feel like there was a London project that we were looking at. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. Oh, it wasn't archeological, but
00:49:42
Speaker
but cultural and that they were doing that anyhow with cues through your phone. I don't think that they were doing any kind of augmented reality. They just were taking your location and telling you left from here, right from there. But if you had the headphones and you have the noises telling you to track a little farther left or a little farther right to get to your intended destination, that would work quite nicely too.
00:50:07
Speaker
Yeah, I have one that I just saw on my, uh, on my phone here when I was scrolling over to try to find that, uh, uh, Microsoft soundscapes app. It's called a hollow body. And I don't know if that's what we're talking about or not. Is that it? That was the one that we're talking about. Um, sometime last year, fair. I don't think we ended up discussing it on air at all.
00:50:29
Speaker
I don't know. I remember downloading it and it was a little strange and I didn't really go through the whole thing, but it was basically, yeah, following, following auto audio cues and things like that. In fact, right when you turn it on, it says set airplane mode and turn your headphones up. Um, very focused on audio and, and you know, as a podcaster, audio is, is very, very interesting to me. And, uh, you know, a lot of people focus so much on video, but augmented reality,
00:50:55
Speaker
Unlike what you're saying with virtual reality, virtual reality really is immersive, right? And you have a little bit more control over the subject. And I think that's why movies are in movie theaters. And back in the day, they were in movie theaters out of necessity. Nobody had a TV, so you go to the movie theater and see a movie, and that just continued.
00:51:13
Speaker
I think smart movie theater producers and directors have realized, like you said, they have a captive audience and it's dark and your eyes going to go where you want it to go so they can distract you on the screen because you're literally not looking at anything else, ideally. And that's the bonus of virtual reality as well. You control the entire environment with augmented reality. Audio is such a,
00:51:35
Speaker
a big component of that because it's an easy thing to do especially with something like these bows frames you don't have to have big confusing headphones in and in fact most people would look at me and not even realize that i had something different on my head it's not like the old uh like google glass that had like a you know a camera and the lens or something like that that you could actually see
00:51:53
Speaker
If you didn't look at these twice, you wouldn't notice that they had a thicker frame on them and that maybe there was something else going on in there, but you probably still wouldn't understand what it was. And so you can have this entire experience, this augmented reality experience that really is just audio in this case.
00:52:08
Speaker
and nobody else would know the difference. And the only thing you need to add to this to really solidify the augmented reality experience is video displayed on the lenses and that's it. And that again is the hardest part because video takes so much power and so much more computing power to actually transmit and display on those lenses that we haven't really gotten to the point where we can affordably put it in the frames and use the phone to drive it. And so,
00:52:34
Speaker
But we're not far, I can imagine. I imagine if you wanted to pay $10,000 for a set of glasses, you could have that. But nobody does, so nobody's inventing it yet. But that's where I think the future is. Thank you about these bows. The arms are a little thicker. They don't look ridiculous, but they're a little thicker than a normal set of sunglasses. Would that interfere? Say you were on a job site that you had to wear ear protection.
00:52:59
Speaker
I'd interfere with it. I wouldn't be able to hear the microphone, the speakers then. I imagine you wouldn't be. Yeah. If you just had foamy's in, it wouldn't interfere with those, but yeah, it would block the sound actually from coming in your ear because it's pointed to it. Now, if you had to wear sound attenuators like earmuff kind of things, that would
00:53:21
Speaker
I don't imagine that wouldn't have, that would affect it the same amount any pair of sunglasses would. Right. Well, that's why these are a little thicker. Yeah. These are a little thicker on the outside. Yeah. Now one of these speakers would probably be inside the earmuffs so you could probably still hear it. But then again, I think they would be separating the earmuffs from your head enough to where you probably wouldn't be getting the benefit of the sound attenuation to begin with. So probably more damaging to your ears. Yeah. Again, I don't wear sunglasses. So anytime I've wear worn earmuffs, I, uh,
00:53:51
Speaker
have not had glasses on, so I don't know how that works. Anybody normally wears glasses can probably answer for me. How do you not wear sunglasses? I can't go outside without sunglasses on. Of course, I don't wear glasses full-time either, so. Yeah, I find I wear reading glasses full-time now, but that's about it. Now, sunglasses, they get things in my eyes. Dust, sand, whatever always gets in my eyes when I wear them, so I stopped wearing them.
00:54:18
Speaker
I'll tell you what, Paul, you come out in the summertime, this with me and do a survey in the Eastern Mojave with me, and you'll be hitting the gas station after day one, looking for a pair of cheap ass sunglasses. Don't forget. I did my dissertation in, uh, in Yemen for a long time in Petra. I'm kind of used to the bright sun. Oh man. Yeah. I think we pulled together a pretty decent episode out of this last minute. So that's good. Yeah.
Listener Engagement and Support
00:54:45
Speaker
Again, if you're interested in any of this stuff, we'll have the links for all these things in the show notes over at arcpodnet.com forward slash archaeotech forward slash 127. And you can find all our episodes over there down on the sidebar if you want to scroll down and see those. Also, if you've got something that you're doing, if you've got time, sounds like people probably do, and you want to talk about a paper you're writing, field work you're doing, anything that you want to talk about with the tech component, which is pretty much all archaeology as I think we identified in the second segment here.
00:55:14
Speaker
Let's talk about that. Even if you think it's something routine and mundane, it might not be for somebody else and it could be something that we could help show somebody that maybe they could take whatever you're doing and use it in their research because people tend to get pretty isolated and siloed in their own research institutions or just their own little cohort and they don't know what else is going on. So come on the show and we'll talk about it.
00:55:36
Speaker
That's it for today. I think we'll be back again next week. I don't know what we're going to talk about, but we'll be back with another great conversation. And again, thanks for listening. And thanks, Paul. Wash your hands. That's right. Our new sign off. Wash your hands. Stay safe. Take care.
00:55:59
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:56:24
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. 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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:56:46
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to archpodnet.com slash members for more info.