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Studying Archaeological Sites and Artifacts with New Technologies with Denisse Argote - Ep 211
1.1k Plays11 months ago
On this episode we bring back Dr. Denisse Argote to talk about some of the new things she and her team are doing in Mexico. We get an update on Teotihuacan and other research. We even talk about ray guns on archaeological sites! Or portable XRF. Either way, it’s great.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/211
Links
- Denisse Argote, survey at Teotihuacan: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440320300637#!
- Episode 134: https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/archaeotech/134
- The Backdoor to Hell, Dutch Stonehenge, and the Age of Bamboo - TAS 225: https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/archaeology/225
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
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Affiliates
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 211
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 211. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today we talk to Denise Argate about new techniques she's using to study archaeological sites and artifacts. Let's get to it.
News and Travel Plans
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul, how you doing today? Doing fine. It's a nice fall weather here, and I'm hoping to get away from it before it gets any colder. Just found out that we won a new project in Saudi, and so it's quite likely that I'm going to be heading out in a week or two to go lead this. It's going to be a big overhead power transmission line survey. So yeah, it's not something I've done before, but I've done a lot of survey work there, and I'm looking forward to getting back out in the field. How are you doing, Chris? There you go.
00:00:51
Speaker
Oh, I'm doing all right. Yeah. We're on our way across the country to North Carolina. We usually go there for mid November to end a December timeframe to, uh, you know, visit with my wife's family for the holidays. And so we're, we're currently in Alabama, but it's nice and not too hot here, which is not something you usually say about Alabama, but you know, I was going to say, you get in that project, you're just like a typical New Yorker wintering in Saudi Arabia. I'm telling you.
00:01:16
Speaker
Everybody's doing it now. Everybody's doing it. You're going to have to just get an apartment over there, start bringing your wife over, you know, just make a time of it. So we've got, we've got a house that we rent, so I don't need an apartment, but I am considering buying a car out there for myself.
00:01:31
Speaker
Yeah.
Denise Argate's Background and Work
00:01:32
Speaker
All right. Well, today, speaking of working abroad, we have someone on calling from Mexico today and we actually had her on back in episode 134, which we will link to in the show notes. We're going to get an update on some of the things she's working on and maybe some new information as well. So welcome to the show. Denise. Hi, Chris. Hi, Paul. Nice to be here with you.
00:01:54
Speaker
Glad to have you back. All right. Yeah. So why don't you just start off by, you know, reacquainting our audience with who you are and what you're doing, like where you're working right now and, and just some, some overall general details. And well, just say already, I'm Dennis Argard, live here in Mexico. I'm an archeologist. Uh, but I also work a lot with here, archeological or archeometrical methods and techniques. I apply them to the study of archeological sites and materials. I,
00:02:25
Speaker
Keep working here in Mexico City on several sites. I've been working on Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza, Midland, just to say some few of the sites that I have worked with. But I mean, all the work that we have done, me and all the colleagues that work with me, well,
00:02:43
Speaker
has been pretty cool. Yeah, awesome. Well, so we linked to an article in this episode from the Journal of
Research at Teotihuacan
00:02:52
Speaker
Archaeological Science. It was published in June of 2020, designing the underworld in Teotihuacan, cave detection beneath the moon pyramid by ERT and ANT surveys. And we talked to you about that on the last show.
00:03:02
Speaker
So we can reference that last, that other show for if people want to know more about that. But I'm just wondering, starting with Teotihuacan, have you guys been back there since then and doing additional work? What kind of update can you give us on that? Well, we also work on another area of archaeology that is portable entry fluorescence. But this was applied to the moral paintings. We haven't been working on the geophysical part. We stopped that project.
00:03:32
Speaker
but we keep on working on the other area that is pure chemistry. And we also find very interesting things like, I don't know if you know, you know, Cinever is a mineral that was used to paint some bodies, some boreals. And we also found that in the mural paintings, it was never
00:03:55
Speaker
being found before in not into Tiwakan maybe in the Meijian area but not into Tiwakan it was the first time that we found understanding mural paintings the application of this mineral I mean if you mean maybe the audience doesn't know what Cinnabar is but it's a mineral that is made from mercury and sulfur it is kind of toxic so
00:04:24
Speaker
I'm not surprised that ancient people didn't use it often. But in the kind of, in the place of the Tiwaka, we saw some structures, we found this mural.
00:04:37
Speaker
years applied on your paintings, so that was also a really interesting find. Yeah, I'm actually, as soon as you mentioned Cinnabar, I thought, oh, Mercury, and you also said, on graves, my only real knowledge of it is that Cinnabar was found on some of the bodies at the Royal Cemetery of Ur in Iraq,
00:04:59
Speaker
It's presumed that it might have been used in part as a preservative. Do you know if that's the same thing with the Mexican graves that have Cinnabar in them? Well, the Cinnabar had more like a cosmogonic point of view, like a world tradition. It was not because of the preservation of the bodies, it was more related to the way that they saw Cinnabar and related to
00:05:27
Speaker
the way that blood itself behaves. Why is this? Because cinnabar, when it's applied and it's oxide, it gets black, obscure dark. Blood does the same way. If you leave blood stains in a wall and get oxide, it also gets a little bit dark.
00:05:54
Speaker
So in this way, they relate it. The color is red also. I mean, there are several characteristics that relate cinema to blood. So blood is life. Blood is the substance that people gave to the gods to maintain and sustain life. So there are several magical associations, religious associations, and that was the
00:06:23
Speaker
motive that they use Cinnabar to apply to the boreals and some other materials. We also found Cinnabar in Chichen Itza. There is also an article we published in 2017 about a sculpture that is inside the castle. The castle is the greatest pyramid in Chichen Itza, also known as the Kokolkan Temple. Inside of it, there is a nation substructure
00:06:51
Speaker
a substructure and other. An older pyramid and inside this pyramid there is a temple, inside the temple there are two sculptures, a chakmul and a jaguar throne. This throne is painted in red and this red painting is cinnabar and emathith.
00:07:15
Speaker
So there's also another association of this mineral to something that is not human remains, not burials, not bones. And how did you find it on the mural? With portobolex refluorescence. This juice of new technologies to the study of archaeological sites and materials has been developing a lot in the last 20 years. And one of these developments are
00:07:43
Speaker
portable instruments. Afrofluorescence make us analyze several, several materials. You can do sculptures, you can do obsidian, you can do bones, you can do more paintings, a lot of analysis that you can do with that. And what we obtain is the chemical composition of the material you're analyzing.
00:08:11
Speaker
In this case, moral paintings. We also analyze a gel work drone with the same instrument and we are also applying it to provenance studies of obsidian materials.
Portable XRF Technology Benefits
00:08:23
Speaker
I'm just wondering, you know, this is the archaeo tech podcast. So we'd like to expose our listeners to technology they may not have used or explain the use a little bit. So I'm curious about the portable XRF, which I know we've talked about on the show before and has actually been around for a little while. But can you give us some idea as to the practical application of using XRF? Like does it have certain conditions that it works better in? How long does the battery last?
00:08:51
Speaker
For example, I mean, you're going out possibly in the middle of nowhere. Do you have to bring extra power sources? I mean, I don't know anything. I've never used one. So just some practical uses of it. What are some of the considerations? Well, this instrument is really practical because it looks like a laser gun, actually. Many of my colleagues play with it. Anyway, that's something.
00:09:16
Speaker
And you can take it anywhere. I mean, you use portable batteries too. You just switch them like any instrument that uses lithium batteries. So it's really practical to take it anywhere. You don't need any special preparation of the materials, maybe a little bit of cleaning with a brush, a soft brush or something like that.
00:09:41
Speaker
But you just can point at your material and just shoot practically. It also has a trigger, so it looks like a pistol. Nice. Nice. Great. So you can take it anywhere you normally take your ray gun. Exactly. I mean, we have analyzed some morals in the ceiling, some paintings in the ceilings of very tall, medium buildings.
00:10:09
Speaker
And I mean, believe it, if you have any bigger, heavier instrument, you could not check it out. And, but with this pistol, you just go and shoot of the, of the wall and you don't damage anything. There's non-destructive, non-alterating, non-invasive instruments.
00:10:30
Speaker
Nice. So if they make a modern Indiana Jones movie or Laura Croft or something and want to have a pistol on their show on their hip, they'll have an portable XRF, right? Exactly. Well, you can see if your enemy is made of any contamination.
00:10:48
Speaker
So, the data that you get back from that, I'm presuming that you have to process it in some form. What do you get directly back from the XRF ray gun? Well, you have two informations, qualitative and quantitative information. In the qualitative, you get a spectra, or a spectrum if you're analyzing just one artifact, and a spectra of all the
00:11:16
Speaker
chemical elements that compose your sample. And then you can make a linear regression using some standards and produce, convert this spectra into quantities. That could be percentages or part per million, depending on the element. So you got the quantitative part.
00:11:43
Speaker
Of course, the spectra, you can see it. For example, in the case of Cinnabar, you only need to see the two main elements that compose Cinnabar, that is sulfur and mercury. If you have these two elements in the spectra, then you know you have Cinnabar. But for example, in the case of obsidian, when we want to know where the raw materials come from, we need to process this spectra
00:12:12
Speaker
convert it to quantities, and then statistically process them to make groups. And then to know where these artifacts that we found in the main area, where the raw materials come from, came from. So there are the two parts. It depends on the objective you have, what is the use that you want to make of the information
00:12:40
Speaker
When you have this objective really clear, then you can know how to process the data and how to use your instrument. Okay. All right. Awesome. Thanks for that explanation. With that, we are going to take a break and come back on the other side and continue this discussion with Denise Argate back in a minute. Welcome back to the Archeotech podcast episode 211. That's a lot of podcasts. Yeah.
00:13:06
Speaker
Anyway, I think I subconsciously didn't know we were podcasting that high because when I created the link for our show last week, it was like, I think I did 210 or 110 accidentally, like subconsciously. I'm like, there's no way we can be in the 200s. But anyway, there we are.
Geophysical Techniques in Archaeology
00:13:20
Speaker
So go back and listen to the back catalog. There's many years worth of things there.
00:13:24
Speaker
All right, so one of the things that brought you into this podcast was discussing new technologies and methodologies applied to the study of archaeological sites and artifacts. And I know you mentioned you've worked in Chichen Itza most recently, not leaving Teotihuacan just now, or maybe we are. If you want to talk about Chichen Itza, that's fine. But I'm really interested in what some of these perhaps newer things are. Like XRF is something that I would say not everybody uses, but it has been around for a little while.
00:13:52
Speaker
You know, it's just not an instrument, not everybody has purchased, right? That, that they have, but it's the kind of thing that, that everybody probably knows about at least to some degree. Is there anything that you're using in the last couple of years that maybe is a little bit on the, on the fringe or on the cutting edge and not too many people are using it as well? Well, I don't know if you know about GP6, there is also been applied, I believe in the last decade.
00:14:15
Speaker
Well, this here in Mexico, maybe in some other places, it has been longer. Here in Mexico, in the last decade, it has been a really good development of these instruments and the application of them in the study of archaeological sites. We have applied them in Teotihuacan, as you already said, in this article of the Journal of Archaeological Science. We have applied them in
00:14:43
Speaker
Chichen Itza, that is also a great site. We are recently applying it in Mitla. It's an archaeological site in Oaxaca. Oaxaca is one of the greatest cultures that also lived here in Mexico in ancient times. And we had really good discoveries around all these places. I mean, in Teotihuacan, we found this cave beneath the moon pyramid.
00:15:12
Speaker
And as we can see by the data, it is a natural cave that tell us that is the only natural cave above which there was a built a pyramid in the Quetzalcoatl pyramid and the Sun pyramid. There are all artificial caves. Only in the Moon pyramid is a natural cave. What does this information tell us is that
00:15:40
Speaker
probably this cave was the focal point or the whole design of the city. It's like this is the starting point for the design. It's actually the only fixed point in all the avenue of the dead. So it is really important data because regarding this discovery, we can have a lot of conclusions or interpretations
00:16:10
Speaker
about what the ancient people thought, what they used to design the city, to trace this ancient city, and to decide how it was going to be, how it was going to be built. So I believe that is a really great discovery.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm curious about that natural cave that was found and that being kind of the basis and the earliest part of the building and construction on the site. What other evidence do you guys have that's correlating that? What evidence do you have that's showing that this is the earliest occupation, but building period, I guess. Well, of course there are several other archeologists have made excavations inside the pyramid and they found
00:16:57
Speaker
really all the stages of the construction. There are several, seven stages that have been found, only for the construction of this pyramid. I mean, the cave has not been excavated yet. We are trying to convince some authorities to do so, at least a little bit of money to do that. But in the meanwhile, we only have the information that we instructed by these archaeological, archeometrical means,
00:17:27
Speaker
So besides that is what we have. I mean, the other two caves that have been discovered are artificial. I mean, think of it. If you have three great pyramids, the three of them have caves beneath. Two of them are artificial and one of them is natural. What would you think about?
00:17:51
Speaker
Sounds like they're part of a complex, right? Between the pyramid and the cave going together in their cosmology in some sense. Exactly. The caves, pyramids and mountains are really important features in the cosmology of pre-Hispanic people. They made a nexus. You know that the university in ancient times, well, they thought
00:18:18
Speaker
That way, it was divided in four portions. And in the center was the fifth portion. The center was the axe that unifies the improv world, the underworld, the superficial world, the perennial world, and the divine world. And this axe was in the middle of the pyramids. So if you have the underworld,
00:18:47
Speaker
The pyramid and then the sky, you have a nice links or these three planes. Hmm. Okay. Do these case intersect? I can't remember if you said that or not. Are they, is it like a network of caves or are they separate amongst the area? Okay. Yeah. Only link to the pyramid that they are in it. Ah, okay. Okay. Awesome. Wow. That's really cool. So these cases have been explored. They just haven't been excavated. And is that what, is that right? Yeah. Okay. Oh, there's, um,
00:19:16
Speaker
Kukurkans, well, Ketsakotl, I mean, because Kukurkans is in the Majin area. Kukurkans is another temple that also have a cave, in this case, partially visible water in the Chichen Itza site. And it has the same meaning, right? The unification of the three planes, the underworld,
00:19:44
Speaker
the perennial world and the divine world. I mean, there are several examples in Mesoamerican sites that have these elements in their cities. So there is some pattern in the worldview of these ancient civilizations.
00:20:04
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So when we spoke to you last three years ago, when you were talking about this, I remember being really kind of blown away by the discussion of ERT and A&T and how you were finding how you'd found these caves and the 3d modeling of them noninvasively or basically noninvasively from sensors outside. It's been kind of a touchstone, something I think about actually fairly regularly for some reason, when I'm thinking about, you know, the 211 episodes of this podcast.
00:20:35
Speaker
And I was wondering, because I was considering reaching out to you separately, but I'm so glad that you're here anyhow, what other kinds of geophysical techniques have you been pioneering, experimenting with, using lately? Because this one here was, you know, the ERT and ANT, when you first told us about it, was absolutely new to me. A novel has never heard of anything like it before and was, like I said, was blown away by what you were able to find using them.
00:21:00
Speaker
Well, ERT is a little bit more common case in Chichen Itza, five years before we use it also to find the cars beneath the Kupo camp pyramid. We also
00:21:12
Speaker
use them in other small sites in Tlascala and Nidalgo and some other states here in Mexico. Radar is also very common. I'm sure you have heard of it because it's like the most common geophysical instrument that has been used in a lot of colleagues around the world. And we are also using it in all the sites. It is really important to, I believe so, to use more than
00:21:41
Speaker
just one instrument when you are dealing with a archaeological site. Because like in the case of Teotihuacan, ERT gives you a higher value resistance anomaly. But you can interpret it like hard rock or like a void. So how are you going to discriminate between these two very different materials when
00:22:10
Speaker
to use another, a second technique that gives you insights of, oh, it is a low velocity anomaly. So it is a void, not hard rock, you know? So using more than one just technique is better because give you more information of what you are dealing with, what you are finding, right? So, and is,
00:22:38
Speaker
seismic noise is really new in the case of archaeological studies.
Mitla Cave Exploration
00:22:46
Speaker
We're also using it now in Mitla, in this Oaxaca archaeological site. We're also getting really good information. For example, Mitla is a site that its name says, means the place of the dead.
00:23:09
Speaker
But very few tombs have been found there. So why was it called the place of the dead if you only have like two or three tombs, right? So there is a nation legend that says that beneath the Spanish church was a cave system where the
00:23:34
Speaker
ancient Zapotec people buried their governments, the kings and all their big authorities. But it was, it has never been found. So was it real or is it just a legend? So we applied an ERT, an ant to search beneath the church. And actually we found some caves beneath the church.
00:24:03
Speaker
So it seems more like a real thing than a legend. And it's also a good discovery because that explains the name of the city. It is the place of the dead because all the important high rank authorities were inside these dumps, inside these places, for real places.
00:24:29
Speaker
Okay. Wow. That's, that's pretty cool. I love being able to, you know, take a place name like that. Right. And then, you know, kind of look for the significance behind that. Um, it reminded me, it's when you said Miele, it sounded familiar to me and I had to look it up. We covered a story about that on episode 225 of the archeology show, which came out on July 9th of actually this year. So, um, the article was called the back door to hell. That's.
00:25:02
Speaker
a news article, but yeah. All right. Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, we will wrap up this discussion with Denise Spargate back in a minute.
00:25:13
Speaker
Welcome back to the Archeotech podcast, episode 211. And let's shift gears a little bit. So you mentioned Chichen Itza. What have you guys been doing over in Chichen Itza? Because Chichen Itza is one of those places that I feel like just about everyone's heard of, like the pyramids of Giza or something like that. You know what I mean? It sounds like one of those places everybody's known about. So what new research is being done? What unanswered questions are you guys looking at in that area?
00:25:39
Speaker
Well, after the 2014 and 2015 discovery that we've made with the RT, we have been working also with archaeological materials, the structures, moral paintings with portable, every fluorescence. And in the former two years, in the last two years, we made another project. We are working on another project using radar
00:26:09
Speaker
to analyze all the plaza. There is a really big plaza that is around the Kukorkan temple. It's around 10,000 square kilometers. So it took us around 10 days working sun to sun. That was really hard because it's really hot in there.
00:26:38
Speaker
Oh, yeah. But I mean, 10 days working to sweep all the plaza and the ballgame to see what's beneath. You know, Chichen Itza also has several construction stages. Chichen Itza is a site that were built around
00:27:03
Speaker
650 before after Christ and was abandoned around maybe 10, 11, 1100 through Christ. So it has around 500 years of settlements. So the last one that the one that we can see currently is the last stage
00:27:34
Speaker
But there is a 500-year history beneath this plaza, you know? So we occurred to use radar to see what's been needed. And we found two previous stages of the construction of this plaza. It was really small in the beginning and grew over time to get the size that we can now see.
00:28:05
Speaker
So it's also interesting because it tells you about the history of this settlement. Did the, just a little bit about Chichen Itza here, did the function of Chichen Itza change through time? Can you tell that within the archeological record? Well, in the beginning, it was also a ceremonial site, at least in the center part, but it was also high-run settlement.
Cultural Influences at Chichen Itza
00:28:33
Speaker
There were several palaces in what we know as the old Chichen Itza, that is the south of the site, like two kilometers south of the Kukulkan pyramid. So there were also several colonies.
00:28:50
Speaker
Well, small areas that were occupied by different rulers. It's a very complex city because you have a very cosmopolitan area with people coming from several sides of the Magen area. It has people from Ishmael, people from my Japan, people from the center of Mexico that were communicating and interrelated with
00:29:20
Speaker
the Chichen Itza people is very complex. It's very similar to Teotihuacan. You know, Teotihuacan is also a very cosmopolitan city that welcome people from all around the Mesoamerican area. In this case, Chichen Itza also had the influence of several cultures, Central Mexico cultures and Mayan cultures. So this gave this
00:29:49
Speaker
this bloom of the, of the culture of the Chichen Itza culture. Okay. Wow. And when, when did you guys work out there last for Miami? The last time we went is, it wasn't me. I am preparing the report of the last town we made still working on the report. I mean, because it is hard work to go to the field and make the prospection, but it's a lot,
00:30:19
Speaker
longer to process the data, to make sense of it, to try and apply different filters, to enhance the features, the features that you are finding, and then to write a report that makes sense to other people that do not manage this kind of information or techniques. So it's a long, a long project, a long work.
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah. I know you're still in the process of writing the report, but is there anything you can disclose that, uh, were some insights or revelations based on the research you guys did? Well, in the case of the ball game, we know that it extended longer than it seems that is currently seen. We also find a small structure near the ball game inside the plaza, but
00:31:13
Speaker
almost in front of the ballgame that you cannot see actually or currently. We also find two stages of the construction of the plaza. And we believe that we might found near the pyramid, near the circuses, some areas with some burials, but we don't know if there are human remains or maybe just some
00:31:43
Speaker
gifts for the gods. So I mean, there's still a lot to work with, but these are some things that we cannot see just by walking around the island.
00:31:59
Speaker
Right. Of course. So, Denise, you're obviously working all over Mexico and have worked all over Mexico on a variety of different sites with a variety of different geophysical techniques. Is there something new of a new project that you haven't yet started or maybe some new technique that you're hoping to test out sometime in the near future?
Future Projects and Innovations
00:32:19
Speaker
Well, we're trying to build a lab in the area of Chichen Itza. It's still a project that's going on.
00:32:26
Speaker
But we want to implement several technologies through the archaeological study that is maybe x-ray diffraction, a Raiment, laser Raiment, I don't know, you know, Raiment spectrometry. Hmm, I don't know, I'm not familiar with it. Well, it's a laser that is beamed to some
00:32:49
Speaker
artifacts or even walls or any solid material, and it can give you this mineral that compose this, this sample. For example, in the case of pigments, red pigments, you know, the common pigments, the minerals that were used to make red pigments are iron oxides and cinnabar.
00:33:16
Speaker
If you just see them, you might not discriminate which was. Or even in the iron oxide, you have several minerals, goethite, emathite, limolite, and some other minerals. And you cannot know which of these minerals are the ones that they were using. So Rayman spectrometry tells you the precise mineral that was used to make this pigment.
00:33:46
Speaker
So that is also very good information. And there are two two instruments, the one that you have in a lab and the one that you can take to the sites. So it's also not destructive. It's really, really important now in current.
00:34:04
Speaker
archaeological investigations. That sounds very similar to XRF. How does it differ from like the portable XRF? Or do you just walk in out there with a holster with one laser on one side and one on the other side and just shooting everything? Yeah, that's it. There are complementary techniques because XRF fluorescence tells you the composition. It will tell you you have iron, you have
00:34:33
Speaker
maybe sulfur or the elements, but you don't know the mineral. Raymond tells you the mineral doesn't tell you the composition. It tells you the mineral. Okay. So they are complimentary. I mean, with fluorescence, I can tell you this red pigment was made of iron oxides.
00:35:01
Speaker
But I cannot tell you if it was emetid, limolyt, coetid, or any other mineral. Raymond, or even H-ray diffraction, can tell you that information. So they are complementary.
00:35:18
Speaker
Okay. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. I don't think I'd ever heard of that one. That's spectrometry. We'll have to find some information about that. All right. Well, we are just about done for today. What do you guys have coming up on the horizon here? What's, what's your next field season look like? Uh, BC as always. I mean, we have, uh, in the state of chapters, there is a project to find the remains of an
00:35:45
Speaker
All general that came, or a Colombian general that came to Mexico and established in Chapas, but the Colombian government wants to find him because he is a hero in that country, but they do not know where is the burial place of his remains, so we are going to try to find them. That's a project for
00:36:10
Speaker
for next year. We also have going the Mitla area project, also the Chichen Itza project. We are trying to make leader flights to map all the tropical area. You know, it's really difficult to walk around in these environments.
00:36:33
Speaker
So a later image could tell us a lot of how is the distribution of this city without having to walk around all this jungle land. So these are two projects that are going to be running next year. And there's always new projects. There's always new people that come to us and ask us our help.
00:37:02
Speaker
analyzing, statistically processing the data, making an analysis. I'm also working on a royal paintings. Rupesh, I don't know how you say it. All these prehistoric paintings are made in caves. Okay. We are also making some analysis in caves to see the pigments, determining the raw materials of these
00:37:31
Speaker
pre-story paintings. It's also a project that's going on. I don't know. There's always you. All right. Well, it sounds like you're keeping busy anyway. Yeah, I'm more busy than I would like to, but it's fine. Thank you. Despite your busy schedule to take some time to talk to us about this, it's been really fascinating to me.
00:37:59
Speaker
Nana, it was really great to talk to you guys. So thank you for the invitation. And I hope to maybe be here some other time. Great. Absolutely.
00:38:12
Speaker
Exactly. So if you, or if anybody else listening ever wants to come on the show, talk about any projects you're working on and just have a conversation with Paul and I, then hit us up at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com, or you can find contact information on the show notes or the webpage, arkpodnet.com. All right. With that, thanks Paul. And especially thanks Denise for coming on the show.
00:38:39
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.
00:39:05
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.