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Maps for Time Travelers with Dr. Mark McCoy - Ep 131
277 Plays5 years ago
Archaeology is time travel. Full stop. When. you’re standing on a site holding an artifact it’s interesting to imagine what the landscape and environment was like when the person that created it was standing there. Our guest, Dr. Mark McCoy, is using maps and digital archaeology to envision archaeology as Time Travel.
About Mark: Mark D. McCoy is an expert in geospatial archaeology and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of over forty scientific journal articles on the archaeology of the Pacific Islands.
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- Chris Webster
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- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
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Transcript
Zencastr sponsorship 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.
Podcast Episode 131 Introduction
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Archeotech Podcast, Episode 131. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to Dr. Mark McCoy about his book, Maps for
Guest Introduction: Dr. Mark McCoy
00:00:29
Speaker
Time Travelers. Let's get to it.
00:00:32
Speaker
Mark De McCoy is an expert in geospatial archaeology and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of over 40 scientific journal articles on the archaeology of the Pacific Islands. Everybody, welcome to the podcast. Paul, how's it going? I'm doing OK. I think it's really been crazy at the end of the school year. And we're trying to figure out professional development.
End of School Year & Professional Development
00:00:55
Speaker
We still don't know what next school year is going to look like. But I think that pretty much everybody that deals with schools in any ways
00:01:01
Speaker
pretty much in the same boat.
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, good. I like to mention that it's Tuesday, June 16th, as we're recording this because things are changing so rapidly, but we'll talk about what I'm doing in the, uh, uh, we haven't had an app of the day segment for a while, but I have an app to talk about this time that I am just floored by. So we're definitely going to at least mentioned that app in, uh, in the app of the day segment and our wrap up in segment three, but it has to do with some field work I did this weekend, which included two firsts, one, my brand new RV and two,
00:01:32
Speaker
absolutely annihilating a deer doing 85 in a rental car.
Fieldwork Anecdote: Deer Accident
00:01:37
Speaker
So ruin the car, ruin the deer. So we'll talk about that in segment three though. In the meantime, let's talk about time travel or at least the book maps for time travelers, which I think is a fantastic title by Dr. Mark McCoy. Mark, welcome to the show.
00:01:51
Speaker
Hey, thanks. My pleasure to be here. Yeah, so why don't you tell us
Dr. McCoy's Book on Geospatial Tools
00:01:54
Speaker
about this book? What's it about? Give us your elevator pitch for this book. Yeah, this book is an introduction for a general audience on what we in archaeology would call the geospatial revolution. So it's really an introduction to how we use all kinds of tools like geospatial, tools like GIS, like GPS, all kinds of remote sensing, drones, geophysical survey.
00:02:18
Speaker
It just kind of puts all that into a kind of a format that just about anybody can pick up and understand.
00:02:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's a lot of stuff that we talk about on the regular on this podcast. So it was fun reading the book and seeing how you synthesize, you know, we tend to talk about in little bits and pieces when you try to make an overarching narrative. So who is your intended audience for this particular book? And why did you feel the need to cater to them in the particular way of, you know, of a book, a full book length, as opposed to like what we're doing with our podcast or Twitter or whatever else?
00:02:55
Speaker
Right. I should say I'm a big fan of your podcast. And I think this kind of format, you guys get to really drill down into the nitty gritty of archaeologists practicing today.
Public Perception vs. Reality in Archaeology
00:03:06
Speaker
The technology is always a moving window. And what can we use it for? What's it good for? What's it not good for? And that's a great internal conversation for us.
00:03:14
Speaker
all to have and one of the things that I realized a few years ago is there's no real way that we're kind of making those conversations more transparent to you know anybody who's you know interested in archaeology but their only image of archaeology is kind of
00:03:29
Speaker
Indiana Jones, right? And that's not the reality of archaeology in a lot of ways, but more specifically in what the kind of day-to-day of what an archaeologist does. And so the thing I was trying to do with this is really to kind of put it in kind of a historical perspective of these are the technologies that have come in and these are the different ways we've used it.
00:03:48
Speaker
And then to give people the kind of idea that, you know, we're using these things to try to tell a story. And that's a thing that, you know, you don't have to be a technological wizard to understand. You just have to sort of think about what it's like to be in the past.
00:04:02
Speaker
Nice. So why don't you give us a little more detail on the
Non-archaeologist Friendly Book Structure
00:04:05
Speaker
book for the audience? Because obviously this is a new book out and I'm willing to bet that this is their first encounter with it. We'll of course link to the book in the show notes so they can pick up a copy and check it out for themselves. But why don't you tell us how it's structured and what they can expect from reading it.
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, so the way I've structured it is it's really, again, for a non-archeological audience, but I think archaeologists will appreciate it as a kind of reflection of what it's really like to kind of work with these tools. The first part is really just an introduction to archaeology itself and talking about the genre of time travel, right? Time travel in fiction and time travel in TV shows and movies and
00:04:43
Speaker
My love of archaeology, my love of time travel and fiction are pretty long-standing things that I've loved, but I never thought to try to put them together. I have done it in this book as a way to get people to think about how archaeology operates and how we think our way to
Aerial Imaging & GIS in Research
00:05:01
Speaker
the past.
00:05:01
Speaker
So that's kind of the first part of the book is, you know, explaining what archaeology is and how it does. There's a part that really just walks through three different kinds of technologies are kind of sandwiched together. The first is looking at different kinds of aerial images, you know, starting from the very first aerial images that we have from hot air balloons to aircraft, and then all the way, of course, up to satellites.
00:05:24
Speaker
Then, you know, it kind of pivots to talk about different kinds of things that for, you know, again, for a general audience, I would just call scanners, right? So things like using LiDAR, whether it's handheld LiDAR or aircraft-based LiDAR, and geophysical scanning and all the different tools that we use for geophysics.
00:05:40
Speaker
And then there's a chapter that's really, I mean, it's about GIS, it's about digital mapping, but it's also about kind of the way that we create these kind of digital worlds, right? And to be, to use these tools as more than just mapping, right? It's also very much creating a database and creating an imagined version of the past.
00:05:58
Speaker
So that's that's one section really just talking about the technology. Then there's a section that I had to say for me was the most fun to write, which is the I have three chapters where I'm talking about the places where I think we're applying these technologies the best.
Geospatial Tools in Various Studies
00:06:12
Speaker
This isn't a book about my I do talk about my research, but it's a book about
00:06:16
Speaker
all the different folks who do work with this, the technology, including guests you've had on the program are certainly featured in here. And so it goes around the world, different topics, different places, but really centering on three main things that I think we're doing really well with it, which is one is looking at mobility, looking at travel and looking at peopling and things like that.
00:06:37
Speaker
Another thing that I think we're using it very well, you know, looking at food, right? Looking at the environment, environmental kind of archaeology and those sorts of things. And then the third one is looking at society, ancient societies. That's kind of reconstructing ancient cities and then also a kind of sensory thing, few sheds and other ways to think about what it had been like in the past.
Time Travel Metaphor in Archaeology
00:06:58
Speaker
And then I sort of wrapped the whole thing up in in the time travel metaphor again, right? Because let's be honest here, physics has been promising us a time machine for a very long time. They have not delivered. Right. But look, the thing that we're doing, we're as close as anybody is going to probably get to a time machine. But you know, you got to really like invest in it. You got to think about what it is. So the last one is a really a very direct shot at telling the public what I think they need to know about archaeology.
00:07:28
Speaker
Great. Well, one of the things that, I mean, it's right there in the title, but archaeologists, we're always dealing with space and we're always dealing with time. And I like how you bring those not as two different topics, but really two sides of what we essentially do as archaeologists. And you use that to drive forward your discussion the entire way through the book. For a lay audience, I thought that was a really nice way to structure it, to kind of give it a backbone. Thanks.
00:07:56
Speaker
I could also see this being an introductory textbook companion to an undergrad course in archaeology because it's very readable and it lays forth a simple easy to follow argument that just rings true based off of our own decades of experience in the field.
00:08:15
Speaker
One of the other ideas, and it's a quote, but you repeat frequently through it from David Hurst Thomas, is that archaeologists are not interested in finding things. They're interested in finding things out. I wonder if you could maybe expand upon that idea a little bit with regards to how you expand upon it in the book or with geospatial technologies and GIS mapping and the like. Thanks. That's a great question.
Storytelling Over Treasure in Archaeology
00:08:41
Speaker
I do come back to that a bunch of times because
00:08:44
Speaker
You know, I think for a lay audience, it's very easy to think that we as archaeologists are always obsessed with things because that's what we show off in museums and that's what we're always talking about. And if, you know, the news is doing a story, it's about a thing that's been found. And it's always imagined that it's very precious because it's old. But of course, the thing is, it's probably not that rare, right? I mean, when a lot of the technology you guys talk about on
00:09:06
Speaker
podcast here and then all of us deal with is dealing with a problem that we find lots of things, like too many things, right? And that's what we're often using this technology for, is to be really efficient in trying to record information about those things. And I think for, you know, again, somebody coming cold to archaeology, that's a surprising thing to learn.
00:09:26
Speaker
But also on the kind of time travel side of things, you know, because we're not interested, you would think like, Oh, you give an archaeologist time machine, they must go to the past and then like scoop up all the goodies, right? And take them, which, of course, is not what we would do with that, right? We would go and we would be like ethnographers, right? If we could, we had a time machine, you go back and make observations, because we want to tell a story.
00:09:48
Speaker
who wanted to be about people. So it kind of breaks down, I think some of those take it for granted that things, again, an intelligent lay audience would look at and go and think that must be what archaeology is like, when in fact, that's not what archaeology is.
00:10:02
Speaker
I love these parallels with time travel because I, you know, my wife, whenever we're sitting watching any show or TV or movie, or that has anything to do with time travel, I'm just like completely picking it apart because they always get it wrong. The one thing I feel like that we've all taken in, if anybody's ever seen any time travel is that if I were to go back in time,
00:10:20
Speaker
I would want to touch and manipulate as few things as possible. You know, everybody says, I want to go back and kill Hitler, but everybody always knows that, you know, if I do that, that's going to have ramifications that aren't necessarily good or bad. They're just things would be different if, you know, even, I mean, you could go back to Hitler's time and kill a small child. That's random and not even written about in history. And that could have ramifications throughout time. So not picking things up is kind of one of the deep seated things in our brains, but
00:10:47
Speaker
You know, when it comes down to visualizing archaeology as time travel, which I think all archaeologists have done once or twice in their lifetimes, if not every single time they're on a site. I mean, I was just on some archaeology sites this weekend up here in Northeastern Nevada. And you know, you're just sitting there, you're holding this projectile point in your hand and you're just
00:11:06
Speaker
looking at your surroundings and trying to put yourself in the in the shoes or the sandals or bare feet of the people that you know that lived there at that time you know one thousand two thousand three thousand years ago trying to think what did this place look like what were they doing what were these hills like was this stream over here was you know what was going on and that's how we all experience time travel but
00:11:27
Speaker
You know, archaeologists generally, we don't think about just picking that stuff up, but other people do, you know, and they just like, I want to take this. But if they were going back in time, like I mentioned, they would instantly think, well, maybe I shouldn't because this will destroy the future. They don't think that pulling something from now is still destroying our future. It's just a future that hasn't happened yet.
00:11:46
Speaker
So I like to think about that. They don't think that they're time traveling, but they are from a, you know, the future doesn't exist yet standpoint. So I don't really know where I'm going with that. It just made me think about
Public Misunderstanding of Artifacts
00:11:56
Speaker
it. And it's just, it's just interesting to think about things like that. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, you make a lot of great points there. And one of the things is, of course, that object that someone else picks up or you pick up, that's been time traveling, right? It's been traveling at one second per second, right? All the way from the past to us.
00:12:12
Speaker
And that's a great thing about using fiction is in time travel stories, like, for example, those kind of classic Isaac Asimov, you know, 50s era science fiction versions of time travel. You know, whenever you read those, the time traveler themselves, and I should always probably just say himself because someone's always a man.
00:12:31
Speaker
right, is very much a product of that time. Like you can't change that part of it. So like you write a time travel story now, you can't help but have the person who's traveling through time be a modern person. And we can never take ourselves out of that imagination, like you're talking about holding an artifact. And so I like that it doesn't divorce us in the modern day from thinking about that. We have to be the conduit, we have to get in the time machine.
00:12:56
Speaker
right? To think about things. Yeah, yeah, indeed. So let's get back to the focus of the book, because I'm really interested in the fact that you wrote this for a non-archaeologist audience. And I'm just wondering, man, how big of an audience is that? You know what I mean? Because I think archaeologists
00:13:12
Speaker
I think there's a lot of archaeologists that would find a lot of interest in this book. We don't need to read something that's overly jargony to have fun, right? I mean, it's nice to just sit down and read a book that just teaches you something and shows you the bigger picture about the world around you. So I think a lot of archaeologists and a lot of archaeologists listen to this show. So I hope they go pick up the book, but a lot of archaeologists get a lot out of this
00:13:33
Speaker
this style of writing for, uh, for a topic that is generally overly complex for people. I mean, the minute you say geospatial or GIS, a lot of people's eyes glaze over because there's so many facets to it that it's hard to, you know, I mean, I took an entire graduate course on in my grad school just on, you know, GIS and the fundamentals of GIS. And I already knew a little bit, but I learned so much in that. And there's obviously so much more to learn. So what made you decide to write this for a non-archaeologist audience and how
00:14:03
Speaker
how are you and your publishing company marketing this to those people? How are they going to find it? What are they looking for that allows them to find it? Yeah, now those are both good questions. I'll start with the first one, which is the reason I... So I could have written... I'm an academic, right? I could have written just a book, only an archaeologist would love, right? That was just digging into the techie part. I love that part too.
00:14:27
Speaker
But I sat down one, you know, and I thought, okay, well, you know, I really do believe archaeology is for everybody. And if it is for everybody, like, how would I explain this part of what I do to, you know, and again, an interested and intelligent person, but, you know, somebody who has another graduate level class in GIS.
00:14:44
Speaker
And that's when the time travel thing hit me. And I thought, okay, no, I think I can do this. And I kind of workshopped it a bit. I talked to a lot of folks who are, especially non-archaeologists, I'd say, hey, read this and tell me what you think about it.
00:14:59
Speaker
And then I was very fortunate to have a relationship with the University of California Press, this is academic press, and their team was looking for archaeology books that weren't necessarily your kind of typical monograph, right, that you would pick up. And this really piqued their interest. And so I worked with a
00:15:17
Speaker
an editor there who really believed in the project from early on that she really worked with me. She really kind of pushed me to say, OK, what are you trying to say with this? What is the important parts? To get into a little of the kind of behind the scenes piece of it, there is a person called a developmental editor. So this is someone who is not an archaeologist, who's an academic in some other field, who reads your thing and tells you, OK, these are the things you need to change to really reach
00:15:46
Speaker
a broader audience. So we got workshopped a lot, which improved it greatly. And I mean, don't get me wrong, I've written a lot of things that are almost too unintelligible to me to read again, right? A lot of academic things. This was my first attempt to try to really reach a
00:16:01
Speaker
to the University of California's credit, they've been huge supporters of me and the project. They put the cover of my book on the cover of their catalog for the season and they've been featuring it on the website because I can't do in-person sort of promotions for the book. So we had a number of those planned that obviously fell through.
00:16:23
Speaker
I have an interview with the head of the press that's going up online that people can see where I talk about the book for a little bit. So they've been great in terms of really seeing what the project is for and then trying to actually achieve getting it out to a broader audience.
00:16:42
Speaker
Okay. Well, that's awesome. And I think we've got some more questions about the book, of course, coming up in the second segment, but I really love talking about archeology in the context of time travel, because like I said before, I've, I've always kind of thought of it that way, but you never really match it up with the science, science fiction aspect of time travel.
00:17:00
Speaker
But man, that really is what we do. We're telling stories to bring people back into the past. We're telling those stories with our maps, with our books, with our papers, with our podcasts. And I think that's a fantastic way to look at it. So we will take a break right there and come back on the other side and keep talking to Dr. Mark McCoy back in a minute.
00:17:18
Speaker
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00:18:42
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to the Archeotech podcast episode 131. Today we're talking with Dr. Mark McCoy about his recently published book, Maps for Time Travelers. Mark, a quote that I pulled because I really kind of liked it was, recording the location of things is just the first step. And I like it because that really leads into a lot of the discussions that we have here. And I was wondering if you could maybe expand on that or give an example either from the book or from
00:19:07
Speaker
any other part of archaeology that you care to about how you what you mean about that being just the first step of a process that kind of gets to one of these kind of fundamental things about not just how the public views these technologies and how archaeology might use it but how we also think about these things right so I mean it won't surprise you I like I like my toys right I like to have fun things to use to record the locations of things in the
00:19:33
Speaker
I like remote sensing, especially love Lidar. It's amazing every time. But that's not the job, right? It's one part of the job, but it's just the beginning. If you know where a thing is, then you know where a thing is, and you don't necessarily know anything more than that until you start layering on
00:19:55
Speaker
context, time, and then you're starting to talk about not just locational, where the thing is, right, locational data. Now you're talking about locational information, right? And even if you get to that point, right, and you say, okay, I know where a thing is, I know maybe what it is, and I have an idea when it belongs to, it's still not evidence of anything yet.
00:20:18
Speaker
Right. And especially this frustrates me when I see especially like remote sensing covered in the popular press. Lidar is evidence of fill in the blank. Well, probably not. Not until you do a lot more work with it and actually turn it from vocational data to information to actually setting up a framework, right, to be able to understand that. And we've got a great number of frameworks that, you know, archaeologists have created.
00:20:45
Speaker
from the kind of scientific sort of side of archaeology, from the kind of more humanities side of archaeology, that you can apply using these different technologies. So that's one of the reasons why I talk about it as being, you know, just the first step. So that notion of a process, I really like, you know, in the fact that this is a book for avocational archaeologists, interested parties, not necessarily specialists, though, again, as an archaeologist myself, I found it fun read.
Explaining GIS with Google Maps
00:21:13
Speaker
That process though, the mapping, again, it's right there. It's the first word in the title of the book, but we always start out with these spatial visual representations and then go from there because that in and of itself isn't enough just in the same way that you were saying before. It's not about finding the object. It's finding what that object might mean in a whole wide range of different kinds of meanings.
00:21:40
Speaker
You do go into some of the tool sets that we use. And obviously, anybody that listens to this podcast is used to us discussing various tool sets. And your specialty is GIS. So how does one go about making GIS accessible to a lay audience?
00:21:57
Speaker
One of the reasons I really kind of dove into this project, this book, is if I'm sitting on an airplane and somebody asks me what I do, and I have to stop and think, okay, do I have to explain what GIS is to this person? And most of the time I do, I have to explain it, and that's fine. But it's something that we interact with every day, right? You use satellite navigation, you're interacting with a GIS, right? If you go on not just Google Maps as a GIS,
00:22:24
Speaker
But then Google Earth is also, it's not quite a GIS, right? It's more of an atlas, where you kind of can play around and explore with it. So I talk about Google Maps and Google Earth, because those are the things that where most people are going to interact with a GIS in some fashion.
00:22:39
Speaker
But to kind of dive one kind of level deeper into that is what I try to get across to people is, you know, GIS is just the latest version of how we humans make sense of space and represent it, right? So for, you know, most of
00:22:58
Speaker
the time period where we have written history, there are probably people out making maps. And especially, obviously, the classic historical white paper map. But that's not the only way that we make maps or representations of space. So I work in the Pacific. We have these great, great navigational charts. You may have seen them in these stick charts that are made in Micronesia with sticks and shells and things.
00:23:21
Speaker
And the thing is, if you didn't know how to read it, it would just look like a piece of art. We as humans have a whole kind of range of creativity. And that's really what I think the digital opens up, is you're not stuck with a static white paper map anymore. You can actually just start over and think about what's a way that's useful for you to think about the world and the space that you're in.
00:23:43
Speaker
And that can be done in a kind of a good way and a bad way, right? So one example I talk about in the book is historical maps, right? So you guys may have done this with the GIS before where you've taken a historical map.
00:23:56
Speaker
It's just a white paper map, and then you put it in geolocated and put it in real space. And then you could even put it on your tablet or your GPS and walk around on it in real time. And you're walking around on a historical map. And that's a fun thing to do, for sure. It feels like walking back in time. It definitely has those qualities. But those historical maps are deeply problematic.
00:24:21
Speaker
If you're looking at maps from essentially the conquest of the New World by the European nations, those are figuratively and literally writing off everybody who's living in those lands. They're writing off all the place names. They're writing in new ones.
00:24:41
Speaker
And you can use that same GIS, that same tool, and you can see there's a project called the Decolonial Atlas, which if listeners haven't seen it, you're into GIS. I definitely recommend it. And just essentially, it's kind of what it sounds like. It's taking GIS and it's kind of applying a perspective that is not coming from that kind of explorer, colonial's perspective, but flipping the script around.
00:25:05
Speaker
giving native place names and turning perspective around to show the world in a different way. So that's one of the ways that I kind of try to explain GIS and then obviously it's the meeting place of all those tools that we use, all those fun gadgets that we use to record the locations.
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah. And I think I like to think of GIS as the, uh, exactly like you said, the meeting place. I've never really thought of it as a meeting place, but it really is like the bucket that we dump everything in so we can relate it all to each other because we have so many different tools out there, but a lot of those tools have, have exports and
00:25:44
Speaker
information that we can bring into the GIS in order to see it all in one place. That's why it's a geographic information system. I've seen people use it not even necessarily for geographic reasons. The base
00:25:59
Speaker
connecting point might be a space, a place in time, whether it's even just like a state or a city or something like that. But then there's so much more information attached to it. I've seen somebody actually just sent me a whole GIS database. Basically that was when I opened it, I said to send me site records and instead they sent me a GIS zip file that I opened up in. I use QGIS here at home.
00:26:21
Speaker
and in my company. And I just opened it up in that and the site records were in it. You click on it and the site records are linked right inside there. So that's a nice thing that you can do with GIS. And I think getting people to understand that is pretty tough and it's good looking at the general public where this was written for
00:26:39
Speaker
You know, I live over here in Nevada and I know you went to school in California and so you're probably deeply aware of forest fires and the wildfires and things like that that can happen. And every time that happens, guess what everybody's looking at? Everybody's looking at a GIS map. They just don't realize it, but a GIS map of the fire progress and the fire lines and where those things are. And they might be in the news or on a website or something like that, but that's what they're doing. And these people are taking in all these disparate pieces of information
00:27:07
Speaker
and bring it in to make this comprehensive map that lets people know what's going on and where things are right now.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's even more difficult to get across archaeological information. I'm not an expert in California archaeology or Nevada, but as I understand it, if you had, for example, the state database of sites for California and Nevada, and you walked along the border, you would find very different densities of sites that have less to do with the actual density of sites and more to do with how the data was recorded. Maybe that's a problem that's been resolved.
00:27:43
Speaker
It's not the kind of problem or a kind of thing that you kind of get across to a lay audience Because for one, I mean just the problem of defining a site, right? That's an inherently archaeological problem We don't even want to talk about it. It's it's so hairy
00:27:58
Speaker
But on a larger scale, we often keep the locations of sites secret, at least in the US we do, as a way to protect them. If it's not a well-known site, and we don't have a good reason to, it's often protected. And that's problematic because it makes archaeology seem a lot more rare than it is. All of that places where the wildfires are going.
00:28:19
Speaker
over. There are going to be sites all through there, but if you ask an average person on the street, they're not going to think that that place is full of archaeological sites, necessarily. It's a wilderness. That's one of the things I wanted to get across in the book, that archaeology, obviously it's precious, but it's not rare. It's everywhere.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah. Well, Hey, I know we don't want to talk about this. Let me just bring up defining a site for one second here because this goes, no, this goes back to maps, right? Because like, like I've worked in California, I work a lot in Nevada, in Nevada to artifacts or features or combination, uh, makes a site basically anything, any one artifact or, you know, even one feature without any artifacts can be an isolate, right? Like an isolated feature or an isolated artifact.
00:29:06
Speaker
So two, generally, when you step across the border into Utah and it's 10 artifacts in a certain class, right? Of the same class would be an isolate, but 10, but 10 artifacts with more than one class, like you've got lithics and let's say you've got ceramic or something like that.
00:29:21
Speaker
You can have one of each of those and it's an artifact, right? I mean, it's a site if you've got two different classes, but the rules get all crazy. The reason I'm mentioning that is because the BLM basically governs all of Nevada for the most part. There's Forest Service, but BLM is like 90% of the state, so you have to be certified or not certified.
00:29:40
Speaker
permitted by the BLM to do archaeology here. And the way that they determine where you get permitted, like which BLM districts you get permitted for, is based on your experience that you give them, your experience in prehistoric and short projects, in the context of this map from a book by a guy named Jennings that I think was produced in 1988.
00:29:59
Speaker
And he produced this cultural map of the Great Basin, which, of course, the Great Basin is all of Nevada, for the most part, except for the very southern tip getting into, like, the Lake Mead area. And parts of Utah, parts of Idaho, and parts of Oregon. So those figures, they go all up around there. And yet,
00:30:17
Speaker
So we're given our permits based on those cultural areas defined by this guy back in 1988, which I'm not saying anything about that is probably right. But then the minute we cross the border, it's all different. And it's like, why, why are we even considering state borders when it comes to these things? And it not only does it crazy when you cross the border, like into Oregon, for example, but you're still on BLM land and yet it's different regulations.
Complex Archaeological Regulations
00:30:42
Speaker
It's the Federal Bureau of Land Management, but each state has its own regulations. I just don't understand it. No, no. And this is why I think projects like DINA or the D-I-N-A. Yeah, DINA, yeah. Yeah. But why I think they're so important, right, is they're trying to, you know, they're not necessarily trying to impose one system on everybody, but saying, okay, well, look, let's
00:31:04
Speaker
But let's try to synthesize some of these things on a scale that we archaeologists want to ask questions, right? And we know that people in the past, like people in the present, do not obey state borders. They're going to cross them. And I think to do landscape archaeology, to think about, or why I do landscape archaeology anyway,
00:31:25
Speaker
is because all things being equal in a person's life, you live your life on the landscape scale, right? You kind of interact with not just one room or one place, but a whole lot of places. And so if you're not scaling archeology to that, if you're staying in one square unit or one site or even just a certain definition of site, you're not necessarily gonna, how can you hope to capture what it's like to be a person in that place at a certain time?
00:31:54
Speaker
I actually wanted to bring back a little bit to the GIS. I mean, I guess we're kind of hinting at it, talking about landscape archaeology here.
00:32:03
Speaker
know, when you dump a lot of data into GIS, that's one part. And that's maybe analogous to what that GIS file that you got, Chris, which is great. I mean, it's all in one place, all linked, you can look at it spatially and so on. But then there's the other part of it, which actually dovetails nicely with our last episode about what you do with those data, how you take all that data and you synthesize and you analyze and
00:32:28
Speaker
you mix and match in different ways to try to get at understanding. And that's where some of the really coolest stuff is in GIS. And that's, again, brought up in the second part of the title for time travelers so that we can use these spatial data and try to understand
00:32:50
Speaker
when, how, why people lived in certain ways in certain places that we're trying to interpret based off of what they've left behind.
00:32:58
Speaker
That was kind of a confused way of stating it, but I do think that you make a very strong case for that mark in the book.
GIS in Understanding Archaeology
00:33:05
Speaker
That's really the interesting bit for us as archaeologists, isn't just knowing where things were, but why things were. Yeah, I mean, this is another reason that I brought the time travel, right, and thinking about the past and what it would be like in the past and those big data sets, which I, you know, I'm obviously one of the many people who would love to see big and interesting.
00:33:26
Speaker
data sets, geospatial data sets in archaeology. But one of the things I think that works against us is the image of an archaeologist as a treasure hunter, as Indiana Jones. Don't get me wrong, I'm of an age where I'd be lying if I didn't say Indiana Jones is why I got interested in archaeology as a kid.
00:33:45
Speaker
And I like punching Nazis just as much as the next guy, but that's obviously not what we do. And we kind of, you know, I thought about just, you know, you could kind of be blue, yell blue in the face about why Indiana Jones is a toxic kind of an image of an archaeologist. But I thought, you know what, why not fight fiction with fiction? And that's another reason that time travel, look, it doesn't have to be, you know, one thing. And in fact, if you look at kind of fictional time travel on television, for example, now,
00:34:14
Speaker
It's a lot more of a diverse kind of cast of characters, and then you have to think about what those modern people, how they might see the past.
00:34:24
Speaker
Well, since we're talking about fiction and time travel, a game that we often ask ourselves as archaeologists is like, if you actually had a sci-fi style time machine, where and when would you go? So I'm going to ask you, is there a particular culture, particular time period that you would like to go and be a fly on the wall to try to understand better if you had your HG Wells type of time machine?
00:34:50
Speaker
oh yeah sure yeah and that's um i could be pretty specific about that i would love love to be a fly on the wall in old hawaii so the hawaiian islands just on the eve of contact with europeans i think it's a it's a really interesting place it's a place where in a matter of
00:35:07
Speaker
less than a thousand years probably went from never having seen any humans there to having one of the most complex societies and a unique culture and language and how that happens in that particular moment in time would be fascinating. But as I say in the book, I need to make multiple stops. I don't want to go to a different place. I want to see that progression over many centuries.
00:35:35
Speaker
Right. Yeah. That's like the genie in the bottle thing. You always have to wish for more wishes. I think with your first time travel stop, you have to go about 10,000 years into the future and make sure this is permanent. Like get the latest technology.
00:35:48
Speaker
Just hope we're all still here. Somebody's here by then. So yeah, well, thanks, Mark. This has been great. I hope everybody picks up the book. Again, we'll link to it in the show notes. This is a great book for archaeologists and non-archaeologists because of the way it's written, but also sometimes it's just easier to take in information if you can sit down and just have a page shirner of a book that is about a subject that we're all interested in, whether we like it or not. Some people might say, well, I really love ceramics. I really don't care about
00:36:17
Speaker
you know, geospatial information and mapping and stuff like that. But you actually kind of do, you just don't realize it, right? So it's, it's great for people at all skill levels and educational levels and, and interest levels, I think, as long as you, as long as you love learning about history. So, all right. Well, again, thank you, Mark. And thank you, Paul. And we'll be back in just a minute for the third segment where we will have a short app of the day segment and then we'll wrap this up. So again, thanks, Mark. Thank you. Thanks for your invitation. It's a lot of fun.
00:36:47
Speaker
Thanks for coming. It was really interesting. Thanks for writing this book. All right. 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.
00:37:12
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to the architect podcast. And we haven't had an app of the day segment for a while because of Paul and I have said we're pretty much happy with what we have. However, I had to do some field work this last weekend and circumstances arose and I just wanted to try something different. And in fact, Paul, our discussion with Isaac, uh, Yula, and I went and looked at his GitHub and his, his website and you know, he's got this whole thing around open source technologies. And I was like, you know what?
00:37:39
Speaker
I use QGIS and he mentioned Q-Field, which I've been very intrigued by because I use QGIS, but Q-Field still only works on the Android devices and it doesn't have, they don't have an iPhone app for it yet. Actually, I didn't look to see if they have an iPad only app for it, maybe they do, but they definitely don't have an iPhone app for it. But when I was searching Q-Field, other things came up as they normally do, but one came up that really intrigued me and it's called TouchGIS.
00:38:05
Speaker
And so I took a look at it and you have like a limited free trial that's relatively short. You can't do a whole lot of exporting or anything else with the free trial. So I downloaded that just to play with it. And I got to say, man, in just a few seconds, I was able to set up a project, cache some maps, because we knew we were going to be remote.
00:38:24
Speaker
and then start producing some feature classes really easily. So you can produce different features of different colors, a lot of symbology for points, lines, and polygons. And you can create that stuff really quickly. And here's the real kicker. There's not a lot of easy ways to get shape files into or out of an iPhone, okay? There's a few ways that Esri has that you can download their apps, but you basically need an Esri account to be able to do anything with them because it will only talk with their resources. And some of the others are just
00:38:54
Speaker
Clunky, some of the ones I've seen, they're just really, really clunky on how they operate and how they work. This thing was so damn amazing that I just honestly can't believe it. I recorded several sites with it and only this because technically we didn't need sub meter for these sites. It was a particular area that we're recording in by an agency. And since we didn't need sub meter GPS, that's the only thing I didn't test was if I had hooked up my sub meter antenna, would it have picked that up? But since I didn't need it and we were kind of in a hurry, then I just didn't test it. I didn't have time for it.
00:39:23
Speaker
Plus, as I mentioned in the pre-show, we hit a freaking deer. So that totally destroyed an entire morning for us where we didn't have any access to anything because we were sitting on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere waiting for a tow truck. But touch GIS. So you create a project and again, you have these feature classes that you can put together for different types. So they have a whole bunch of them built in, a bunch of different things with different feature types. But I created one called archaeology.
00:39:49
Speaker
Put in my points lines and polygons for like site boundary and for lines I had like road drainage things like that But the cool thing is you can super easily Make those features so you can you can drop a point for a point wherever you're at or you can move the point around super easy and
00:40:04
Speaker
You can make lines and polygons through either free drawing on the map or actually walking around like you're with a GPS or dropping point by point by point. And it will, you know, create the line or polygon based on those points. So however you want to do it, like if you've got a, you know, some complicated stuff to walk around, like a, I don't know. And you've got to get from here to there and you don't want to have a line going on. You can just hit. Okay. Take a point here. Let me get to this next spot. Take a point here. Let me get to this next spot and just lines them all up. And then you can edit those points as well, right on the GPS, right on the app.
00:40:35
Speaker
So it was just really cool. I had to create three separate projects for the things that I was doing because two different sites that were recording independently and then one we were doing monitoring on a bunch of different sites. So doing that and then labeling the points I should say on the map was super easy. You could pick any of the attributes and you could add attributes on the fly.
00:40:57
Speaker
but you could pick any attributes to basically assign to the labels on the maps, which I'll tell you what, even in QGIS is kind of a complicated exercise. It'll make it super easy. But then the exports, I can export these as shape files. I can export them as a KMZ.
00:41:12
Speaker
I can export them as probably six other things. So the one thing I will say about this, and I think it's totally worth it though, is it's $29.99 for the full version per month. And if you want it for the year, I think it's $300 for the year. So I just got it for this month. And then once I get my stuff exported, I will cancel my subscription because I don't think I need it anymore basically. But for $30, the ability to do what they have that you can do is just totally phenomenal.
00:41:38
Speaker
I'm looking at the app here on the app store and one of the screenshots they have, they say survey. So it's clearly designed not necessarily with archaeologists in mind, but anybody that has to do any kind of in the field data collection. So that's a strong feature.
00:41:57
Speaker
or mentality. It could be something that you're doing the other way around. You're generating maps sitting at the comfort of your desk for distribution someplace else, but it looks like they have baked in the notion of taking and creating maps as you go from data that you collect. Which brings me to a question for you. You can label the points. Is there any other kind of metadata that you can assign to the points?
00:42:20
Speaker
you can have any number of features at all that you want, any attributes, attributes that you either collect yourself or attributes that are automatically collected by the data collection itself. So there's a lot of different things you can put on there.
00:42:33
Speaker
And you brought up a good point too, survey and field data collection, things like that. It really does bring up. It's kind of funny how we just had this conversation with Mark about GIS because this isn't really a GIS. This is a mapping program. A GIS is something like we said, where you bring in a whole bunch of different things and you basically display and do analysis on them, right? You're not doing any analysis on this. You're simply collecting information. And
00:42:58
Speaker
you're exporting that to something where you can do information on it. So it's not really touch GIS, but they call it GIS because when people think of shape files and points, lines and polygons, they think GIS. So, but that's just a, you know, a term society needs to figure out. Yeah. But anyway, I loved it. I am totally floored by how this works. Um, I've exported the data. I actually haven't had a chance to, cause we just got back from this project yesterday morning.
00:43:25
Speaker
So I actually haven't had a chance to look at it in QGIS yet. And if there's any anomalies, I'll have to report back on that. But I think this is a fantastic application if you need to use something. Because there's a whole bunch of mapping apps out there, but nothing have I found has the combination of import and export easily of shapefiles, but also creation of feature classes and assigning those feature classes to different things, like actually creating points, lines, and polygons, modifying those on the fly, adding attributes. Nothing has ever been this easy.
00:43:54
Speaker
I did have to do any of it online. I did it all right on the app, and I could do a lot of that offline on the app. The only thing I couldn't do offline was obviously cache my maps. And in one instance, I was on a site where I forgot to cache maps for that area, and I had to wait until... Well, I just didn't have it. I just didn't have a background map, which was okay. I didn't need it. It's just helpful when you're trying to get previously recorded points and locate those. It's helpful to have the satellite images. But otherwise, I was able to...
00:44:20
Speaker
When we got back into service, because we go over these hills and suddenly we were in cell service, I was able to cache some maps real quick just down at the tile level and do that. So it was great. Cool.
00:44:30
Speaker
All right. Well, I think that's it for this week. I got to get going. Paul, thank you. And again, I'll report back on this maybe in two weeks, because I'm supposed to have that report turned in before then. So when we record next, I will have done the backend side of this thing and I'll be able to do that. If you're using any other GIS applications out there that you'd like for mobile that are just as easy to use, or maybe you've got some that you don't like using at all, let's hear about those too. So we can either warn people against them or something, but
00:44:55
Speaker
Let's talk about it. We'd like to hear about all the apps you're using and the tech that you're using out there. So find us in the show notes on Twitter or by email. But for now, Paul, thanks a lot. Thanks to the audience. And thanks, Dr. Mark McCoy for coming on. And we will see you guys next time. Take care. Wash your hands.
00:45:17
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.
00:45:43
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.
00:46:04
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.