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Muons and More - Ep 169
251 Plays3 years ago
Chris and Paul discuss a couple recent articles. One describes the use of muons as a non-invasive technique for looking inside solid objects, and the other discusses the authors’ R project for visualizing chronology. They might not seem related, but both articles predict exciting advancements in archaeology.
Links
- Seeing deeper with atmospheric muons: From archaeology to geology
- Atmospheric muons as an imaging tool
- Muon Scanning Finds Hidden Chamber in Great Pyramid of Giza
- datplot: A New R Package for the Visualization of Date Ranges in Archaeology
- datplot GitHub repository
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
ArchPodNet
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- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
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: Muons and R
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, episode 169. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk about using muons to look underground and some data plotting with
Hosts' Busy Schedules
00:00:31
Speaker
R. Let's get to it.
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going? It's going OK. We're in the middle of December right now. I've been, you know, breaking my bones, digging up tons of bricks on the CRM gig, enjoying it, though, and doing some planning for the upcoming year. And, you know, this and that. How about you?
00:00:54
Speaker
Yeah, we're still in Charlotte, North Carolina. We came here last year for the holiday season and we're here this year where my in-laws live, my wife's family.
Muons as Imaging Tools
00:01:03
Speaker
And yeah, just crazy, crazy busy. My whole entire job situation is changing at the end of this month when one contract ends and a few others begin. And because of that, I've just been socked in trying to finish up some clients because I
00:01:17
Speaker
I can't or don't want to hand them off to other people on my team. I just want to finish them and get them done. So which is one of the reasons why we were totally unprepared and skipped an episode.
00:01:26
Speaker
So it's just neither of us really had any time to do it. So it's a good thing to be too busy, I would say, but better than not busy at all. But we are back at it and we are going to talk about something super cool that Paul found. And maybe I'll just let you tee it up because I love talking about new technology, especially something that I've heard of as a thing, but never thought to apply to archeology, which is one of my favorite things is taking
00:01:53
Speaker
stuff you never thought could intersect with archaeology and intersecting with archaeology. So Paul, tell us what we're talking about. What we're talking about is a phys.org article that came by on the newsfeed a week ago now called Seeing Deeper with Atmospheric Muons from Archaeology to Geology.
00:02:12
Speaker
And the article is, it's a Fizz.org thing, so it's a very high level, just kind of, hey, here's this thing that was written
Muon Applications in Archaeology
00:02:18
Speaker
about. And they do give the link to the original Science Direct article. I looked over the Science Direct article. It's a lot of math that's over my head, but it does give some good ideas of things that could be done using muons as an imaging tool. And basically what they are
00:02:36
Speaker
It's a kind of particle intermediate in weight between an electron and a proton that's generated in cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. And we're being bombarded with them all the time. They're so small that they tend to pass right through most any kind of object. But
00:02:53
Speaker
For a number of years, people have been making receptors, counters that can capture these things. And so the article is mostly, it's some Italians, Lorenzo Bonacchi, Raffaello, Dada Sandro, and Andrea Giamanko. Nice. Well, thank you.
00:03:18
Speaker
They're mostly interested in geological applications, but they're thinking ahead. They're thinking that there are a number of other applications, including archaeological applications.
Limitations of Muon Technology
00:03:29
Speaker
And I actually, once I read that phys.org, it reminded me of something else, which I can't remember if you and I discussed briefly or where I saw it, but there was another article from 2017 called Muon Scanning Finds Hidden Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza, and that's on the IEEE Spectrum website.
00:03:48
Speaker
Then we'll put all these links, of course, in the show notes. Basically, using these muon receptors, a certain group had found what they think is a big void above the Grand Gallery in the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Understanding Cosmic Rays and Muons
00:04:03
Speaker
I had forgotten about that article. I had forgotten about this possibility, this possible technique, this application of a different kind of receptor.
00:04:11
Speaker
to archaeological applications. But seeing this phys.org, it reminded me of it. And I knew that since you want your tricorder, they can see through the ground that this would be something good for Chris.
00:04:25
Speaker
You know, I think this is honestly, if you were to, I mean, obviously a tricorder from Star Trek is a, is a made up device and nobody knows how it works because it's not real, right? Otherwise we would legit have them right now. But I, I have to imagine that one of the functions of a system of a thing like that is it's just got a really awesome detector that's able to
00:04:47
Speaker
not only expel particles in certain ways and then rate the return, but also pick up stuff that's already expelling like muons. And one of the cool things I like about muons is and other particles like this that come from cosmic rays is
00:05:02
Speaker
You don't need a particle accelerator.
Origins of Cosmic Rays
00:05:05
Speaker
You don't need something else. Cosmic rays, I'll talk about those in a second, but when they hit the atmosphere, they scatter into basically the particles that make up the cosmic rays. And one of those particles happens to be
00:05:18
Speaker
a muon. And if I'm not mistaken, it's a particle that's smaller than an atom. They're just so small. And that's why they go through. They pass through most things, except some of them get stopped if the density gets right. But back to cosmic rays for a second, can we just talk about that? Because using
00:05:36
Speaker
move on detectors to basically detect the muons that are naturally coming through the atmosphere and coming through this great pyramid that was built over, uh, what, 5,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, something like that. Yeah. I mean, yeah, something like that. So they're using
00:05:56
Speaker
a new detector to shoot through a pyramid that's four to five thousand years old, and these muons themselves came from almost an infinite number of sources, but one of the sources is our own sun. It emits cosmic rays, and if those happen to hit us, it's unlikely they will, given how a sphere works and where we happen to be.
00:06:16
Speaker
But if one of those rays hits us, and they do, then we get those muons. But some of the muons, in fact, most of them probably came from outside our solar system. I saw one source that said there's a black hole somewhere, a well-known supernova actually, not a black hole, a supernova that expelled just tons of cosmic rays. And it's likely that some are coming from there.
Challenges in Muon Detection
00:06:37
Speaker
But these take
00:06:38
Speaker
thousands of years to get here because there are many, many thousands of light years away and these things are traveling at the speed of light. So we're using something that's even older than the pyramid to see the inside of an already super old pyramid. And we're doing that with new technology. And I just wrapping your head around that is just super awesome.
00:06:58
Speaker
It's kind of cool. And it also, whether you use it for archaeological purposes or not, the fact that we're talking about cosmic rays and what we always think of in terms of the big science-y thing with archaeology or the first big science-y thing is carbon-14, which starts with cosmic rays. Right. So it reminds us or reminds me of something else that I've heard of before. And so that's a hook for me. I did think it's interesting that
00:07:29
Speaker
a lot of the kinds of, we use a number of different kinds of equipment now to see through things, to see into the ground, for example. And those all rely on a transmitter of some kind, whether it's sound waves or electricity or whatever, and another receptor that's capturing the echo or whatever's passing
Interpreting Muon Data
00:07:53
Speaker
through. In the case of these muon detectors, we're reliant upon
00:07:58
Speaker
Well, we, as if I'm doing any of this, we're reliant on these cosmic rays that are in the atmosphere that are pummeling. Well, not exactly pummeling, because they're passing straight through most everything in their way. And the receptor then captures the ones that
00:08:17
Speaker
that it can in a certain patch that are coming at it in a certain direction, which is interesting because it's not a matter of having a transmitter and a receiver. It's just a receiver capturing what's already out there. And like you said, the density is what matters. So the authors of that article are really interested in looking inside volcanoes, in particular Vesuvius, because they want to see if there's another way of predicting when it might blow again.
00:08:46
Speaker
because right now, like you said, we're detecting them as they go through. But I mean, you got to read these articles. If you're, if you're listening to this, you just got to read these articles because the way I understand, I want to see if you understand it this way, Paul, before we get too much further into what they're doing with this, because the way I understand this is they're basically putting
00:09:04
Speaker
a receiver on one side that can detect or stop muons. I don't know if it's stopping them, but it's at least detecting their presence.
Future Applications of Muon Technology
00:09:11
Speaker
And they're basically looking over because in some of the images in that phys.org article, they've got these big plates essentially. And from what I can tell, they're like, okay, so
00:09:21
Speaker
Over here, where we basically have nothing going through, there's an average number of muons per what unit of space probably, probably per, I don't know how far spread out they are, but per square centimeter, per square meter, who knows, right? But then you move over here and there's far less or far more muons per square centimeter. So that means if there's far less, something is stopping them.
00:09:44
Speaker
they're being stopped by some dense thing that is able to stop a muon, whereas it's not being stopped in another place. Now, some of them are probably just randomly being stopped by whatever. So you got to take like average numbers here. And that's why these detectors are essentially really sensitive so they can detect those
00:10:01
Speaker
I would imagine really small changes in percentage of muons detected and even a small percentage change in an average area would probably tell you that something is likely either there or not there depending on what you're trying to figure out. Yeah, I'm curious to see where this technology goes because right now it seems to me like the examples that we've got for it are on very, very large objects, like no smaller than the Great Pyramids.
00:10:27
Speaker
But the examples that they give as potential uses in the future or in the near-term future are, for example, scanning the contents of cargo vans with, I guess, a detector on one side and a detector on the other side and then seeing what the difference is.
00:10:42
Speaker
So hopefully what the authors are proposing is that this kind of technology is going to, like everything else, become faster and more miniaturized as we go along and be able to be used on smaller and finer grain resolution than what's currently available.
00:11:01
Speaker
And so we don't all need to make scans of the Great Pyramid, but it would be cool if it could be used at a smaller scale for investigating the insides of X, Y, or Z structure. They also give an example of putting the detector down a borehole
00:11:23
Speaker
to look for voids in the rock and soil around, I think in the illustration they have, it looks like somebody's yard. That would be an interesting thing. It would be interesting to see if then we could use this as a
00:11:35
Speaker
Well, not fully non-invasive, but definitely less invasive than regular excavation method of subsurface perfection. Drillable, drop the receptor down there and see what the densities are like around it. So in that way, I guess maybe it would be somewhat like using
00:11:55
Speaker
Oh, what's the one? I'm drawing a blank on the word. The sound waves, you know, when they fire the shotgun shot basically. Yeah, the sonar basically. Yeah, the sonar basically. Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see because this is another one of those technologies. It's not going to be archaeologists driving the bus with it, but definitely there'll be some adaptations coming up soon, I think, that will allow us to use it productively.
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah.
Non-Destructive Imaging Tools in Archaeology
00:12:22
Speaker
Well, let's take a break. And then on the other side, we'll talk about some of the uses of this and more applications where it could be beneficial back in a minute. Chris Webster here for the archeology podcast network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world. All at once we do that through the use of Zen caster. That's Z E N C A S T R.
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Speaker
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00:13:13
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:13:54
Speaker
All right, welcome back to the Architec podcast episode 169. And we are talking with Moana. I mean, Paul, sorry, that was a, I had to get it in there. I had to get it in there anyway. So what you were starting to allude to at the end of that last segment was we need to learn more about what the signals tell us the, the density of muons or how they move through different materials and what that,
00:14:22
Speaker
interaction tells us. We've done this before. We mentioned Sonar. I know it's fiction, but it's based in reality. I always go back to Hunt for Red October when they get a new signal from something they haven't heard before and they basically fingerprint it because they see or something, they check the library of Sonar images. It's literally a printed image of the Sonar
00:14:44
Speaker
return. And it doesn't look like a submarine. It looks like sound waves. And they say, does this, the computer crunches on it says, does this look like something we've seen before? And there's, it's like fingerprints, right? They can really see it. Well, we do this in archeology, of course, with ground predator trading radar, with all of our
00:15:01
Speaker
subsurface geophysical non-destructive techniques. We have to study with known sources and say, this is what it looks like when we go through this in these conditions and then chalk that up in a library. And that's what anybody does that does something like this, even if they're using it for
00:15:18
Speaker
geology or looking through volcanoes, whatever the case may be, they have to test this through known things first and see what the thing returns and then go to a very similar situation and says,
Muon Technology in the Great Pyramid
00:15:30
Speaker
does it return the same thing? If it does, then we're on the right track to a signature
00:15:35
Speaker
And then we can start creating computer programs that say, you know, we shoot at this thing and it says, Oh, it's definitely this because I've seen that 7 million times. And that's what it is. So, right. Well, that, that we shoot at is the, uh, the one caveat there again.
00:15:50
Speaker
We're not, as opposed to most every other technique we use, we're not shooting these muons, we're just receiving them. So that maybe it complicates it again way over my head. It is a slightly different kind of technique than what we're used to in terms of any kind of non-invasive imaging.
00:16:10
Speaker
Well, so the other, the other complication would be the atmosphere itself, right? Like it does, it does different conditions in the atmosphere at different times of the year, scatter cosmic rays in different ways. And does our, does our position in the solar system as we travel throughout the year, how
00:16:28
Speaker
cause us to collect varying amounts of cosmic rays? Or is it constant as we go around the solar system? Because cosmic rays are coming from outside the solar system, so perhaps it is constant. But what about our own solar system's movement through the galaxy? Does that change how we receive cosmic rays? So there's so many variables there that we have to understand. And I'm sure I have no doubt that people do understand this. Muans were discovered, I think one of the articles said,
00:16:55
Speaker
It's, it's a little ambiguous. Yeah. But at least the 1930s, we knew about it. So, so we've known about these for a while. Physicists, physicists have probably geeked out on these for, for, you know, many, many decades. And I'm sure they know way more than we do. In fact, we have a listener to several of our shows who is a, an engineer, I believe at NASA. So maybe he'll chime in and I'll have something to report back. I don't know if he knows.
00:17:20
Speaker
That's right. That's right. So looking forward to that one because he always tells me something I didn't know, which is pretty awesome. I love learning new things. So, but anyway, yeah, we, there's so many variables involved in this. Like, remember when we talked about the, uh, footprints in New Mexico and the carbon sink, uh, the carbon, what, what was it? The carbon sink effect or whatever it is when reservoir effect when reservoir, not sink. Yeah.
00:17:41
Speaker
Yeah, when plants are water-based plants, they absorb more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than other things do, more carbon-14. You get an overinflated estimate of the area compared to things around it. But we understand that and we can correct for it. And that's what that means.
00:18:03
Speaker
I don't know. It's pretty cool. What are some of the uses? Let's talk about that pyramid article a little more and see what they found out of there. The pyramid article, like I said before, what they found is a void. They don't have it, at least this is from 2017. I don't know if they've got better computer models, if they've done more imaging since then.
00:18:24
Speaker
don't know really the shape of it. They see something roughly the size of the Grand Gallery up above the Grand Gallery. My understanding is the way that they did this is they used these receptors, Muon receptors, both external to the pyramid and internally in different spots in order to try to get something of a 3D picture. But it's really just kind of a rough
00:18:49
Speaker
blob of something less dense somewhere up above the Grand Gallery. In that article, and again, it's a few years old now, so there may be other details that I haven't gotten. It's just that seeing that phys.org immediately reminded me of this one.
00:19:06
Speaker
Maybe because one of the illustrations on the phys.org article as well as on the Science Direct article is a Mayan pyramid being scanned. Yeah, but it's very rough. And so one of the criticisms by Zaki Hawas was that, oh no, they're mistaking the signal. It's not a void. There's no real void there. It's not a chamber. What they're seeing is a deliberate construction technique that
00:19:34
Speaker
left voids inside the pyramid in order to reduce the weight above something like the Grand Gallery, which could be true too. The resolution just isn't there yet to know if they're looking at something or if they're just looking at a generalized
00:19:53
Speaker
lesser density, not because of one big void, but because of a lot of little ones that was deliberately part of the construction. In either case, it's really cool. If there's a previously undetected gallery void there, that's neat. If you have proof that
00:20:09
Speaker
This is how the building was built in order to keep it lighter on the inside. That is also extremely cool. So they're both valid things to explore. And both of them are the results of this scanning technique that didn't exist before.
Significance of Muon Findings
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, one thing we can say with certainty is something's different there, right? You can't, you can't, yeah, you can't deny that. And what I instantly thought it might be because of the nature of the graphic on this thing was maybe it's just the fact that it's not solid rock. It's maybe sand as a filler, you know, or something like that, or some other medium. Maybe it's not avoided at all, but it's just something less dense than solid rock. I mean, I don't know if they've got it calibrated enough to know that
00:20:54
Speaker
It's truly empty and therefore an intentional or a construction technique or an intentional chamber. Or if it's just less dense than solid rock, therefore it's assumed it's a chamber. I don't really know if they've got that as fine tuned as that. No, I don't think they do. They certainly didn't in 2017, but it goes back to your analogy from the hunt for Red October. They don't have the fingerprint on it yet. Yeah, exactly.
00:21:18
Speaker
They know there's something there, but we don't know what the fingerprint on it is. So, so they don't know what that something is that they're looking at. Yeah. And unfortunately we don't have a lot of pyramids that look like this to be able to, you know, build a library.
00:21:34
Speaker
I mean, there's lots of pyramids around the world, but nobody built them like the Egyptians did. Just like nobody really built them like the Mayans did either. I mean, the outside shape is similar, obviously, as opposed to like step and smooth. But the inside is drastically different, right? And nobody did this like the Egyptians. And I don't know enough about the great pyramids at Giza to know if
00:21:58
Speaker
if even the insides of all of them look like the great pyramid of Giza, right? Do they all have this grand gallery with the air chambers and the other stuff? I don't even know that to be honest. I'm not an Egyptologist. So, and I know for a fact, it's somewhat differently.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah. Well, they were built so far apart from each other. Yeah. And they're different sizes and, uh, yeah. Yeah. But still super cool.
Challenges and Evolution of Muon Technology
00:22:22
Speaker
And it would be nice to at least do a scan on the other pyramids and see if, uh, if they haven't done already, like you said, this article is about four years old now, but it would be cool to see if they've done this in other pyramids yet and to see if they've uncovered similar things or maybe been able to calibrate this against something else. Hmm.
00:22:40
Speaker
What are some other examples you can think of where we might be able to use this technique? Well, on pyramidal shaped things, cigarettes. I like that example they had of putting the receptor down a borehole because I really thought that.
00:23:01
Speaker
would be useful in a lot of different cases, depending of course on the resolution, and also probably dependent on what the materials are, what the building materials are. I would expect that it's probably better used in places that use a lot of stone as building materials. So I don't know that would help me on any of my tell sites where you're looking for mud brick encased in decomposed mud brick, where it's basically all the same material. But I could be wrong.
00:23:30
Speaker
I often am. I mean, you don't even have much deposition on most of the places that you work in Nevada. So what kinds of things would it help with you, do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think it would depend on, and I was trying to scan the science director article for this and I can't really find it, but I know it's in here somewhere because there's a whole section on the physics of this whole thing, but I'm wondering at
00:23:59
Speaker
what density these are, because that would obviously determine their resolution, right? So how many of these are in a square meter, if that's even a measure, a unit of measure you could use for this? And that would really depend on the applications, because if they are traveling through the planet, and from what I understand, they can, like,
00:24:21
Speaker
Oh, what is it? There's, uh, there's another particle that people try to detect, like the ones that go down into like ice cores down in Antarctica because they need a pure environment. Um, uh, and they interact occasionally and flash on a screen. Right. Anyway, yeah, I can't remember what that's called, but the, I wonder, you know, these can pass through solid rock, but can they pass through the entire entire planet? And what I mean by that is are they dense enough to where I could build eventually a handheld detector
00:24:49
Speaker
and hold it over the ground and basically see things buried in the ground like pottery shirts or projectile points or something like that because the muons are coming through the planet straight up at me. And you'd think if they were universal enough that they would be coming in all directions that I would be able to, I guess, electronically filter out ones or maybe I want ones that are coming at an off angle or a bias from the detector so I can get more of a three-dimensional shape on whatever I'm looking at under the ground.
00:25:18
Speaker
And just see if it'd be able to figure that out. But I would like to see it done with a suite of other tools too, right? Because muons are not the only particle that comes through the planet like that. And if we build something that could detect other particles and their densities simultaneously and build that whole thing in together as a picture, then man, the applications are just amazing to think of what that could do. And you could basically do it for free because these things are just bombarding the planet at all times.
00:25:47
Speaker
So I think that would be really cool until we burn off our ozone and there's nothing for those cosmic rays to collide with. And then they just stay cosmic rays and kill us. So until that happens, this would be super cool. Yeah. Well, since I'm bald, I'm not using any canned hairspray, so I'm not helping with burning off the ozone. There you go. There you go. Good on you. We should all shave our heads. Can't hairspray
Data Visualization with R
00:26:13
Speaker
anymore, man. I don't even think I have no idea. I'm just like, remember the eighties.
00:26:18
Speaker
Exactly. My mom lived on that stuff. Yeah. All right. Well, let's take a break and we're going to switch gears a little bit and talk about another article that Paul found that is actually open access. You don't see that every day back in a minute.
00:26:34
Speaker
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00:26:54
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to The Architect Podcast, episode 160 now. Today, Chris and I are discussing a couple articles that we've read recently and some of the implications of them. We were just discussing muons and we're going to switch gears here. That previous article was open access, which is great because we could actually read the original
00:27:14
Speaker
article, not just the phys.org news announcement. This other article is also open access, which I am a huge proponent of. It makes it so much easier. I get very frustrated when we want to review an article and it's behind a paywall and we have to beg the authors to
00:27:33
Speaker
It doesn't copy or scrounge copies from other methods. It just says a Nicky field. Anyhow, this one is also open access. And what it is, it's in the latest issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice. There were actually a lot of interesting to me articles in this one. I just pulled this one out.
00:27:53
Speaker
Not exactly random, but pretty arbitrarily, just because I thought there'd be something nice to discuss. Maybe not in the context of the article, but more what they've done with what they're discussing. The article itself is called That Plot, a new R package for the visualization of date ranges in archaeology.
00:28:12
Speaker
And it's by Lisa Steinman and Barbara Vysova. And basically what this article is, it describes the process that they went through, the logical process, not the programming process, of creating an R package, R being the statistical software that's very popular with a lot of archaeologists. Yeah, I forgot to give a trigger warning that we were going to talk about R because you either love it and you understand it or you have no idea what we're talking about.
00:28:40
Speaker
Well, art is interesting to me because I absolutely do not love it. I've used it in the past. I get why people love it, but I hate working with it because the syntax is absolutely backwards to me.
00:28:56
Speaker
And that's fine. Everybody doesn't have to use the same kinds of programming languages. Certain things are better for certain purposes. And that goes not just to the toolset, but also to how you think about it. And a lot of archaeologists find are extremely useful and fairly intuitive. I don't find it intuitive at all.
00:29:15
Speaker
And so I'm always bumping up against it rather than being able to use it effectively. Partly that's my lack of familiarity with it. Partly it's because my brain works slightly differently. But I like this article because they're talking about actually solving a very specific problem and building a tool using our
00:29:31
Speaker
in order to solve that problem and the logic behind it. So the basic problem that they're discussing and the example they use is our inscribed materials.
New R Package for Archaeology
00:29:42
Speaker
I'm not even quite sure what the materials are from the territory of Nicaea in northwestern Turkey, what's now Turkey, and looking at it in the Roman period.
00:29:51
Speaker
So they're looking at these inscriptions and the language used in the inscriptions and trying to see patterns of which languages were used in different time periods. And the time periods can be broken down a number of different ways by century, by quarter century. Certain objects can be tagged to a specific year.
00:30:10
Speaker
And that really piqued my interest. When I was working on my dissertation, I was working in Yemen. We didn't have a very good chronology at the time. We still don't have a great chronology. So, I had a little bar graph that I just assigned to each site, each object, each everything. The
00:30:29
Speaker
It was time periods, and there were four different time periods, Neolithic, pre-Islamic, early Islamic, medieval Islamic, and then a three-bar scale saying, certainly, possibly, or not. So I could get a broad, very rough overview about the duration, the time extensive things. And this is not exactly what they're running into, but what they're running into is a related problem of displaying these times.
00:30:59
Speaker
how do you interpret and weight the data so that you can show graphically what's happening at various times in history? And so, again, it was through this article they explained the process and they introduced this package.
00:31:16
Speaker
the fact that the article is open access, the fact that the package is open access, all this was really just, you know, made me happy. Yeah, one of the things I mentioned in the article I can very much relate to, and everybody can, I'm sure, they talk about the procedure of manually assessing the chronology. And, you know, they're just going through, I think they mentioned this paragraph from looking at 1,498 inscriptions and checking the binary expressions of the chronology
00:31:44
Speaker
within a relatively long table. I love the sort of not very committing relatively long table phrase. I imagine the table was incredibly long and just crazy. And they said going through and rechecking this and looking at it and looking at zeros and ones and how they're recording this data, they said the fear of data loss or unwanted changes led to numerous backups of the table, which caused confusion as to which version of the table was even the most recent.
00:32:13
Speaker
just like everybody's been there. And they're done that. Actually, that highlights another thing that I really liked about this. It's a very human that they're not hiding behind the heavy technical aspects of this thing. These are problems that we all can relate to. And so I recommend actually, our listeners read the article, even if they have no interest in in Roman archaeology or
00:32:37
Speaker
the specifics of the chronology that they're tackling with this because it was just nice to see the problems. I was like, oh yes, that reminds me of something. I've bumped up against that exact same issue. The one that really stuck with me is waiting.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah. So the example that they use is like, what if you have a pottery type that's in use for 200 years? Do you say, do you give it a score of one for each of those 200 years? Or even if you're broken up by quarter century, do you give it four ticks for each of those centuries? So eight ticks total. And then you have a coin that's got a specific date that it was minted.
00:33:20
Speaker
Well, it only gets one tick. Why does the pottery get the eight ticks and the coin get one tick? Isn't one a better tool? So they explain how they weight things. And basically, they divide it by the number of possible years that it could have been.
00:33:37
Speaker
That coin minted in year one gets a score of one because it was only minted in that one year. The pottery that was in use for 200 years gets a score of 1, 200th for each of the individual years that you'd want to put it in. That was just a very smart, very effective way of dealing with that. Again, it's stuff that I'm always bumping up against conceptualizing. They're tackling it head on here.
Visualizing Archaeological Data
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is really cool. And I have never used R, right? I've seen, I've seen papers on it. We've had guests talking about it, but I've never actually used it myself. So, you know, I like talking about this kind of thing because the biggest problem, as I've mentioned, probably numerous times on this podcast is not only understanding different technologies, but understanding when you should use different technologies. And that's why I like talking about this actual case study because
00:34:34
Speaker
Somebody might be thinking, oh, that's a really cool thing, but when the heck would I ever use it? And hopefully somebody's listening to this right now, looking at their data table going, yeah, this is absurd. I need to do something else and figure out what this is going to tell me. So I appreciate that you know what they're talking about, basically, and you've got some experience with this and we can talk about it.
00:34:57
Speaker
Well, one of the things they do, if you do just want to jump to the very end of the article, dear listeners, their figure seven shows, well, six and seven, they show they've gone through a number of different transformations and made some educated guesses and give their reasoning for why they smooth things in certain ways and why they divide up the time periods in certain ways. And their last graph shows
00:35:24
Speaker
this curve, a smooth curve that has three distinct peaks on it. And then they propose why those peaks might correlate to actual historical events or historical trends, rather, related to imperial Roman presence and the economic activity.
00:35:42
Speaker
You could certainly argue that those aren't the reasons for those peaks. You could even argue that those peaks are fake, that they're caused by all their smoothing of the data. But it does give one a somewhat empirical basis to say, hey, look at these three peaks. Maybe we ought to investigate this a little more carefully. Does it correlate with other things that we know through other ways, through other means?
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah. And that's really cool. And that's what this is all about, right? It's almost like it's almost like finding a fingerprint, right? And what is that? What does that fingerprint of those, of those peaks represent? Does it represent socio political changes in that area? Does it represent environmental changes that maybe caused different types of, I don't know, pottery or whatever they're talking about to be produced and at different rates or something like that. Is it conquests? I mean, where do you line that up? Where do those peaks line up on a different timeline?
00:36:40
Speaker
And that's really cool. That's a really neat way to look at that. Since you said fingerprint, that does, and I didn't even realize this until I started talking about it here, but it does line up really nicely with the Muan article because we don't know if what we're seeing as a lighter density in the pyramid is because there's a chamber there or because it's built differently there.
00:37:03
Speaker
Yeah. I guess a chamber is built differently, but you know what I mean? If it's a big gap or a bunch of small gaps or different materials or whatnot. We don't know what the cause of those peaks is, but we can have some suppositions and we can explore those. And that's great. And again, because they explained the rationale for why they did everything, both in the specifics of
00:37:27
Speaker
this particular analysis and in the rationale for how they built the tool, the kinds of problems that they were running into, that you and I have all run into when dealing with chronology, it makes a lot of sense. It just pulls you right through very, very, very tightly. So I really like that. And I said earlier, though not fully, is that they also have their, the project is up on GitHub.
00:37:52
Speaker
So if you want to look at it and modify it and contribute to the project, it's there. And so they opened this tool up for others to use, which I think is absolutely commendable.
00:38:03
Speaker
Yeah. And the X axis on that figure seven is the year, if I'm not mistaken, right? Yeah. They don't actually mention that on there. Okay. So that's what I thought. And you know, that's what's really cool about other like machine learning techniques and stuff like that. Like you could, maybe not machine learning, but definitely supercomputer type stuff where you could toss this, the results of this into something and say, we know this is true. This is the X axis. Do you see any other,
00:38:30
Speaker
Graph or thing where these points line up to something else that's been studied, you know, maybe there's something in dendrochronology Maybe there's something in carbon-14 dating maybe there's something in like historical references Like I mentioned that would line up with this and just have a computer spit out possibilities for where these peaks would line up So that's pretty cool on the archaeology show a number of episodes back. We had an article talking about I think it was on the archaeology show talking about
00:38:57
Speaker
a project that was actually a project looking at how climate change has affected the Indian subcontinent basically through time. I think it was something the effect of how different
00:39:12
Speaker
pottery making techniques ended up having a correlation with massive climatic events. And I'd have to go back and look at the article, but basically it's like on the years where they got more rain, they did less of something else and, and they traveled less or they did something less. And therefore, you know, pottery didn't change much because they, they learned what they knew, but on years where there was like less rain or something,
00:39:35
Speaker
people learned new things and new techniques and styles changed because they had more travel and they were able to get around something along those lines. But who would ever think to, to look at pottery styles with climate change? Who would think to do that? I'm glad somebody did, but that's just, it's just wacky, you know, and we need to collect all these things in one spot. So, you know, the computer super hive mind can, can say, yeah, that's obviously this. So I don't know. That's the feature I want.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, I do too. I've said that a bunch of times that I love being able to compare one set of analysis against another. Normally, we talk about that with different kinds of receptors. Gee, I really want to see what my magnetic radiometry says versus my resistivity. Yeah.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But absolutely, you can use it in this higher order process like this and then do it against other kinds of datasets, like you said, historical, things that we know historically.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:40:38
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I don't know if you can necessarily
00:40:42
Speaker
do that numerically with the historical data set, but somebody's working on that. But comparing A to B is really important. And if we can compare A to B to C and start to see patterns emerge, I think that we get a little bit closer to, if not the truth, at least a coherent narrative.
00:41:02
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Well, that sounds like a good place to end this on. And again, check out the articles in the show notes. We will link to those for sure. The, there's three articles for the Muography discussion. And then there's this article, uh, about that plot in advances in archeological practice. And again, this one's open source because advances in archeological practice isn't necessarily open source. So there you go. All right. Well, thanks everybody. Thanks Paul for finding these and, uh, any, any last words on this one?
00:41:33
Speaker
No, no, I think that we said enough about these, but both of these made me happy. So thanks, Chris, for taking the time to talk about them today. Absolutely. All right. Thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next time. Bye.
00:41:50
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.
00:42:16
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, Dig Tech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:42:43
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.