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Mechanized Archaeology using Paleo Digger - Ep 175
276 Plays3 years ago
Brian Fritz is an archaeologist and inventor that saw an issue with deep digging in Pennsylvania. To help out he developed a new machine that can basically do an auger test down to 7 meters, log the levels along the way, and there's an attached mechanized screen. It's a pretty cool system and we hear how he developed it and what he hopes to do in the future with this new system.
Brian’s Bio
Brian L. Fritz is the Principle Archaeological Investigator for Quemahoning, LLC, a cultural resources consulting business that specializes in geoarchaeology, soil geomorphology, and GIS solutions for archaeological problems. Mr. Fritz has earned a B.S. in geology and a B.A. in Anthropology from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and M.S. in Geology at the University of Akron.
For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/175
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- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Details
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, episode 175. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Paul's in Iraq, so today I talk to Brian Fritz, inventor of a mechanized archaeological digging machine called PaleoDigger. Let's get to it.
00:00:26
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the show everybody. Paul is not joining me today because as we've been mentioning the last few shows, he's actually in Iraq during the time of this recording. So hopefully he's safe and healthy and everything's going well. And his survey methodology is working out. I can't wait to see how all that goes over there and
00:00:45
Speaker
the plans that he made and how those go. Cause we all, we all know that plans change once you get in the field sometimes. So it'll be interesting to see how all that shakes out, but we'll talk to him when he gets back in
Meet Brian Fritz and His Background
00:00:55
Speaker
a month or so. In the meantime, we've got a guest today and I first saw our guests information, I think on YouTube or somewhere. I can't even remember where I saw it, but I went there, watched some videos and
00:01:07
Speaker
and said, hey, this sounds like a good thing to talk about on the podcast. So I hooked up with him and now we have Brian Fritz on the podcast. Brian, how's it going? Oh, it's going great. Glad to be here. Yeah, sounds good. So we'll drop your bio in the show notes, but why don't you tell people a little bit about your educational background and your archeological background? Well, I grew up on a farm in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. That's towards the western part of the state.
00:01:35
Speaker
And, you know, during the years when we were farming, when I was growing up, found artifacts, Indian artifacts in the fields in our farm and also was interested in the historic sites on the farm. And we also, when we were farming, we did a lot of our own repair work and we modified our own farm equipment and built a lot of our own farm equipment. So we had a background in fabrication.
00:01:59
Speaker
which has been important to the things I've been doing later in life in archaeology. Our family no longer farms. We still own the farm in Somerset County.
00:02:09
Speaker
But after we were done farming and did some other business enterprises, I had enough money to go to school and get a degree in anthropology and a degree in geology. And I also have a minor in GIS. And then I got my master's in geology at the University of Akron. Nice. Yeah. A geology degree is something I think every archeologist, when they get into the field, they say, man, I wish I took more geology.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yes. I like to say I bring geology into archeology. Nice. Nice. Would you call yourself, like if you were to label yourself, would it be more archeologist or like geo-archaeologist more interested in, you know, soil sciences and things like that?
00:02:52
Speaker
Well, because I run my own small consulting firm, I kind of have to do everything. So I bring the geoarchaeology in, but I do historic archaeology, prehistoric archaeology and industrial archaeology. I kind of have to cover all the bases.
00:03:09
Speaker
Nice, nice. I was, uh, editing the life and ruins podcast and they had somebody on who did, uh, who does geo-archaeology. And he was like, one of the hosts was like, and I never heard this term before and I love it, but he said, I don't understand how some of the geo-archaeologists can just like look at a soap, soil profile and just like know stuff about it. And he called, he called you guys dirt wizards.
00:03:30
Speaker
Which I was like, that's perfect. I love it. Yeah, that's one of the things we like to do is look at the soil profiles. And I use GIS in combination with the soil profiles and auger tests to try to reconstruct the age of particularly alluvial landforms along the streams of rivers.
00:03:50
Speaker
Okay. Well, sounds good.
Mechanization Gap in Archaeology - The Birth of PaleoDigger
00:03:52
Speaker
So we're going to talk about some, some tech that you've invented, but what is your technical background? Like you use the number of, you know, kind of off the shelf technologies and a little bit of programming to, to make your, your paleo digger machine and software, which we're going to talk about here in a little bit, but I want to know like how, what led you to that? Did you learn the skills to put that together because you saw a need, you wanted to make that, or did you learn these skills somewhere else and just apply them to this problem?
00:04:17
Speaker
Well, when I was on the farm, we did a lot of our own welding and fabrication. I look at the past, I look back to the WPA days when a lot of our roads were constructed and all that was done by hand.
00:04:33
Speaker
And if you look at modern construction today, it's all moved to machinery. Hardly anything is done by hand. Yet archaeology is still using the same techniques that we used back in the 1930s to a large extent. And there's been really no, other than computers and total stations in GPS that really haven't mechanized in any meaningful way other than maybe using a backhoe for trenching.
00:04:56
Speaker
And I thought maybe how could we mechanize at least part of archaeology, not all of it, but just parts of it that might make the archaeology more efficient and less costly in labor.
Technical Development of the PaleoDigger
00:05:08
Speaker
Okay, so that pretty much leads us to Paleo Digger. Now, when I was taking a look at a couple of your YouTube videos that I think you sent links over for, they seem to be focused more around the computerized box, for lack of a better way to say that, that actually tracked the depths and holes and things that you were digging in the auger test that you were doing.
00:05:28
Speaker
But also, there was a whole digging machine attached to a Bobcat backhoe type of thing and then into a screen. Did you invent all of that? I was actually curious about that. Yeah. Yeah. So because I was doing geoarchaeology, I was familiar with the hand auger, the bucket auger. Yeah.
00:05:49
Speaker
And my thought was, well, what if we were to size that up? And we actually, I used it on a French and Indian Moore era site some years ago. And we dug, every five meters, we dug an auger hole and screened the soil from the auger hole. And we're not only recording the soil structure, but we were checking for artifacts and we were able to identify the location of the French fort.
00:06:13
Speaker
using that method. And I thought, well, what if I scale it up to maybe an eight inch or a 12 inch auger? And, you know, once you realize how heavy that gets, then you have to start thinking about how you're going to power it and how you're going to lift it. Yeah. So that's how it kind of progressed into the larger machine. So I built the auger, the drill mast and the screening mechanism, all my design. Nice. Nice. So the auger itself is attached to, um, what is that attached to like a backhoe?
00:06:41
Speaker
It's what we call a skid loader or a track loader. The machine runs on tracks and it's used in construction. In this case, instead of a bucket to scoop dirt, I disconnect the bucket and my part of the machine attaches to that track loader. And then it has a drill mast with an auger head that can be extended up and down to lower the bucket in and out of the ground.
00:07:04
Speaker
And how deep could you go with that? Presently, I can go seven meters, which is about. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, do you have much cause in the areas where you're working to go deeper than that? My wife is also an archeologist and she worked on a site in the higher river some years ago and they were down 24 feet in the face. She's, and that's finding like paleo and in stuff back 10,000 take that point. They really weren't deep enough for the paleo.
00:07:31
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's crazy. Okay. That's amazing. So obviously too, this is appropriate for, I'm thinking certain landscapes where you can of course get that equipment to that spot, right? I would imagine you're going to do this in a grid of shovel testing scenarios kind of thing. But you know,
00:07:52
Speaker
a localized area because I think you were off the side of the road in one area doing this, which a lot of CRM archaeology takes place off the side of roads. So that's appropriate. Yeah. I mean, how agile is that machinery? Well, I really didn't design it for upland settings. It's really designed for the alluvial landforms along the rivers and streams where your soils are going to be the deepest. So once you, once you excavate
00:08:17
Speaker
By hand, with a standard shovel test pit, just your round hole, it's hard to go much deeper than, well, our standards in Pennsylvania are a meter, but it's really tough going much deeper than 80 centimeters. And then you can dig one by ones by hand down to about five feet or one and a half meters, then you start to run into OSHA requirements and wall showing and step back and it gets progressively more expensive.
00:08:41
Speaker
And usually those one by ones for the even down to a meter and a half are separated by a distance of 30 meters across the survey area. With my machine, I can do the standard 15 meter or 50 foot interval and go that depth or even deeper. Plus being able to do radials, you know, if you have a positive STP, you could step aside and do five meter increments to delineate the edges of sites. Okay. That's pretty cool. I really like that.
00:09:10
Speaker
I don't know. It's really neat watching it operate and watching it work. Now it took, you know, generally it looked like you had several people out there with this thing all completely dialed in. What do you think? Like two people could probably do this, somebody to run the machine and somebody else to basically guide and look at the screen and do that stuff.
00:09:28
Speaker
The way I like to work it is I bring the machine out and I run the machine and I have the company I'm working for provide two of their archeologists, two or three of their archeologists to probably get by with two, depends on the soils and how much screening we have to do. If it's really sandy soils, it goes through my powered auger very quickly and there's not much screening.
00:09:49
Speaker
But if it were a little sillier or if this, if the test pits aren't real deep, I can pull the soil pretty fast and it's, it's tough for the crew to keep up with the screen and artifact collection. Nice. Nice. All
Electronic Innovations and Excavation Precision
00:10:03
Speaker
right. Well, I don't want to bury the lead on some of this stuff. Let's go ahead and just take a break real quick because I want to come back and spend some time talking about, well, first off the screen and then the software and the box you put together to keep track of all this. So let's take a break.
00:10:17
Speaker
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00:10:43
Speaker
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00:11:04
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeotech podcast episode 175. And I'm talking to Brian Fritz about the paleo digger machine that he invented. So we've talked about the auger portion of it. Now the auger portion, you dump that material into a screen that is round, it's circular, rotating, at least in the videos that I saw, rotating off the, uh, looks like a belt driven off the other machine. And it's at, it's at like probably a 50 degree angle or so. Can you describe that a little bit and see how I did?
00:11:34
Speaker
So yeah, it's around kind of like a tub. It's got the standard quarter inch screen or one hole per or four holes per inch screen that we use in archaeology. So it's one side is open and it's tilted so that you can dump the soil into that screen and it's powered by a hydraulic boater and it rotates. And this is really the most efficient way to move soil rapidly through a screen as opposed to maybe a reciprocating screen. It shakes back and forth.
00:12:01
Speaker
And did you guys, well real quick, did you iterate on that? And, and I mean, cause I've seen screens like that before, like powered screens that do shake back and forth and things like that. What, what led you to this model? Was it, was it, you know, research and development, you know, just trial and error.
00:12:18
Speaker
Well, trommel screens, a rotating screen where you dump the soil, it's like a cylinder and you dump the soil or rock or material into one side and it's tilted on an angle and everything falls out on the bottom that's too big to go through the screen. It's similar to that except the bottom side is closed so that you put the soil in and it rotates and as it rotates the fines dissipate through the screen. And then when I'm done, the screen is designed to tilt over backwards so the dump the contents out into another tub.
00:12:48
Speaker
which then can be transferred to a stationary screen where we can sort for the artifacts. Okay. Have you noticed any, any significant, I imagine there might be minor sometimes, but any sort of impact to the artifacts themselves? I'm thinking about stuff like pottery. I don't know how much you find of that up there, but something like pottery might, might not handle the tumbling through the soil too well. You know what I mean? This is an open question. We haven't been on sites with it enough to, where there was many artifacts to really get a good gauge of that.
00:13:17
Speaker
I don't think it's going to be any worse than hand tools and shovel testing. Sure. Back about five years ago, we were on a phase one where we were digging deep one by ones down to a meter and a half and a crew
00:13:33
Speaker
Actually, they dug through a feature, a hearth feature, didn't realize it until they cut the Kirk point in half with the shovel. So our shovels, DMH artifacts as well, even hand trials. Yeah, for sure. We've all done it. Yeah, this is an open question and one of the critiques I'd often receive. And I have a feeling it's not going to be any worse, but we really need to see results in the actual artifacts to be certain.
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah, you'd almost have to dump in some, you know, do some experimental archeology, right? And have some things created that aren't actual artifacts and dump them in the screen and, and just let it run and see what, see what happens. You know what I mean? Different types of soil matrices too, you know, matrices to see how that goes. So interesting, interesting experiment.
00:14:20
Speaker
OK, so let's talk about, then, the machine that tracks all this and how it works. Can you describe the electronic interface you've got to help monitor all this? So as I'm raising and lowering the bucket into the soil, the mechanism that does that has a chain that lifts the auger head up. And that chain is then driven by a hydraulic cylinder. But because it's a chain,
00:14:45
Speaker
You can put a sprocket on it and that sprocket will rotate as the bucket goes up and down in the hole. And because it rotates at a regular increment, I can meter that. So I have optical encoders on a shaft connected to that sprocket.
00:15:03
Speaker
And so many revolutions represent so much distance up or down. I have two. There's two optical encoders so that it can sense which direction, whether it's raising or lowering. And those optical encoders, all they are is an LED.
00:15:18
Speaker
and a sensor that senses the LED light and there's a little disc in between those the LED and the sensor and there's gaps in that disc. So as it rotates it pulses that LED and a number of pulses corresponds to the linear distance that it moves. So there's an there's a
00:15:35
Speaker
a micropro- an 8-bit microprocessor called an Arduino that's connected to that optical sensor and it counts those number- the number of pulses and then does a little bit of math and calculates how far the auger has moved down into the hole or up out of the hole in which direction. And that's how I measure the depth the auger is digging.
00:15:54
Speaker
Okay. So does the equipment operator sitting in the equipment have to look at this? This is how they know when to pull it out or is it, or does it just like stop at a depth? Is it programmed to stop when it hits a certain depth or you just watch the machine? I watched the depth gauge. So whenever I'm starting a new test pit, I lower the auger head to the ground and I hit reset and it'll, it'll, it resets the instrument to a new
00:16:17
Speaker
test pit and it zeroes it out, basically. There's a digital display that shows the information on the screen. So then as I start to lower, I rotate the auger and start to lower it into the ground, say I go down 10 centimeters, it increments one centimeter at a time as I'm digging down into the ground. So when I reach my 10 centimeter level, I stop.
00:16:38
Speaker
And then I reverse the rotation counterclockwise of the auger bucket, and that closes the bottom of the bucket. Gotcha. So I don't lose any soil as I pull it out of the ground. So as I pull the auger bucket out of the ground, then it'll count backwards, back to zero, or even to the negative as I bring it up above the ground, and it'll record level one, zero to 10. And that'll show on display level one, zero to 10.
00:17:02
Speaker
Then I empty the, I swing out the auger bucket. I open it up and empty it. Soil goes into the revolving screen. And while the rest of the crew is working on screening the soil and collecting artifacts, I'm sending the bucket back down to the hole and start, I started excavating level two and the, and the electronics automatically records level two is 10 centimeters and increments up to 20 centimeters.
00:17:27
Speaker
and then logs at level zero to 20 or 20, 10 to 20 centimeters as the next level. And it just repeats after that. Okay. And is this programmable to like, would the end user be able to program this and say, I want five centimeter levels or I want, I don't know, 20 centimeter levels or something like that? You could do whatever you want. Cause you're actually, I'm actually controlling the depth as it's going down and watching the meter as it increments down into the ground. Okay. So say if I was in a plow zone
00:17:56
Speaker
and we know that the plow zone is roughly say 15 centimeters deep. I could pull the first level from 0 to 10 centimeters out and screen it and I could use maybe a split spoon sampler to check how many centimeters was left in that plow zone and I could actually excavate that specific depth
00:18:15
Speaker
as the next level and then continue with the third level into the subsoil with whatever that depth actually is and then increment and even 10 centimeter increment from there. So you don't, okay, I get it. I think what you're saying is you don't actually have to, you know, it doesn't actually stop it. It stops when you stop it and then that is recorded at the next level. So you could do each level at a different depth if you really wanted to. Yes, I can choose, I can choose how my levels begin and end.
00:18:44
Speaker
Nice, nice. That's really, really cool. I like that. So if somebody's digging more, they don't have much stratigraphy. Like I've done shovel testing in the coastal plain of the Carolinas. And it's sometimes literally all one, one type of soil all the way down, you know, as far as you can dig with a shovel. And we didn't really care what depth things came from because it's so turbulent out there on the coast with
00:19:06
Speaker
hurricanes coming in and rearranging the soil every couple of years. And we just pulled everything out into one shovel test and dumped it into the screen.
00:19:15
Speaker
Oh, you could dig as much as you could fit in the auger probably and then pull it up and then do another level and call it good. Yes. It just depends on your, uh, the geology or your setting, uh, your sediment, what the geology is. In some cases, our stratigraphy is pretty compact along some of our rivers. So I can actually excavate in five centimeter levels if it's called for.
00:19:39
Speaker
Or in cases where you do have pretty sterile soil that you don't have a, you know, really not likely to find much, I can pull as much as 20 centimeters at a time.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah. And you know, some of the benefits I'm seeing of this, of course, every, everything has a trade-off, right? And if you've got humans digging 30 centimeter shovel tests, my God, I have seen everything from, you know, the bathtub where it's rounded at the bottom and concave on the sides because people just don't know how to make straight walls and, and then not flat on the bottom. You see the pinhole where it, you know, kind of comes down to a point.
00:20:12
Speaker
You see all kinds of different things and then people not super great about monitoring levels and
Advantages of PaleoDigger Over Manual Methods
00:20:18
Speaker
stratigraphy. Now, the other question scientifically is, well, do you need to be exact with that? But the answer is, yeah, as close as you can because you're doing a volumetric sample of an entire area and you want to know exactly what the volume you're pulling out is in order to say, well, there's this many artifacts here per density unit measure type of thing.
00:20:39
Speaker
And even if this machine is, I mean, let's say, let's be honest, even if this machine crunches up an artifact or something like that, you know, in the process of doing it, like you said, we've all done that with a shovel and a trowel. So that's not like a huge deal, but it's able to do a more precise excavation and pull out the same, if not better information as far as, you know, stratigraphic information goes.
00:21:03
Speaker
Yes. And particularly here in Pennsylvania, our standard shovel test pit is 57 centimeters in diameter because that works out to one quarter of a meter in area. Okay.
00:21:14
Speaker
And if you were to dig down 80 centimeters and your walls tapered to 40 centimeters in diameter, that's a 30% reduction in the diameter of the test pit, but it's a 50% reduction in the volume of soil in that level from 70 to 80 centimeters. So there's, you know, it's a power, it's a factor of power because volume is cubic. So if you're under sampling 50% by 50% at that level, that's a serious bias.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Whereas my machine's cleaning a straight wall the whole way down. Exactly, exactly. And I haven't dug in Pennsylvania, but I have in Vermont and New Hampshire. And I'll tell you what, some of the clays and stuff up there.
00:22:00
Speaker
I would rather have a machine do that anyway. It's just such a pain in the ass sometimes with some of those really compact soils. I mean, there was a mile of ice over where you're digging. So the compaction is real in that area for what that is. And the standards vary from state to state. Pennsylvania has the largest shovel test pits at 57 centimeter in diameter. Yeah, that's big. Most are around 50 or 40. Some are 30.
00:22:27
Speaker
My machine, uh, cuts a 52 centimeter diameter hole. Okay. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Most, mostly what I've done to be honest down in the Carolinas, Georgia, when I was doing a lot of shovel testing down there was actually 30 centimeters. And then, but the one place obviously where you of course would run into somewhat of an issue, some States mandate square shovel tests. Like I think, um, uh, Florida was 50 centimeter square shovel tests. So that would be a meter.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I mean, if you're pulling out the same volume, like you said, does it really need to be square? So, you know, there you go. All right. Well, let's take one more break and then I want to come back and talk about some of the technical challenges with the electronic box that I saw in the videos and then where you're going with this in the future. So let's do that on the other side of the break back in a minute.
00:23:16
Speaker
Welcome back to the third and final segment of the architect podcast, episode one, a 75. And I'm talking to Brian Fritz about doing mechanized archeology using his paleo digger and the associated software. Now, one thing I saw in one of the YouTube videos and things change pretty rapidly when you're innovating is that it was too cold at one point to actually use the electronic portion of the digger. Obviously the machine was still able to dig and you're able to screen. That probably works in almost any temperature, but
00:23:44
Speaker
the electronics, as people probably know, if they're not, I guess, insulated or even internally heated well enough, you know, electricity just tends to not work the colder you get. So those screens, those liquid crystal displays and other things that you use, you know, tend to have a problem with those colder temperatures. So have you overcome some of that yet, um, with some modifications to your system? Well, after the project, well, first it was, this was in the second week of January and it was pretty cold. We were along the sun, the river.
00:24:14
Speaker
in, uh, Pennsylvania and the river froze over while we were there. Oh my God. Yeah. So it was, it was pretty cold. I thought at the time that it was the temperatures that were the problem and it still may have been, but I tried it later, a few weeks later in cold weather and I didn't have the problem. So I'm thinking maybe I might've had RF interference. So I'm going to have to put some RF filters into the circuitry and see if that eliminates the problem. So I don't have that completely solved. Yeah.
00:24:44
Speaker
I wonder where the RF would have come from. Do you think it was internally within the other systems you have there or like overhead power lines or something? Well, we were right along state route 322, a very busy highway, four lane highway, and there was all kinds of businesses there. There was a truck stop and other businesses, and there just might've been something going on there radio wise. I don't know.
00:25:05
Speaker
Okay. So given your experience with this so far, and you've had some, some pretty good successes with this, what's the roadmap for this paleo digger system look like?
Marketing PaleoDigger and Safety Benefits
00:25:16
Speaker
What do you want to, what do you want to change next? What do you want to add to it? What kind of feature sets are you looking to, uh, to increase? If you were, it's the blank question, blank check question, right? Brian, like if you were given a million dollars, what would you do with this? Well, I, I follow what's called the lean startup method. It's the idea that you're,
00:25:33
Speaker
using a system of validated learning. So every time we take the machine out, it's like an experiment. We have a set of hypotheses that we're going to test. It's basically trying to tune the technical development machine to its actual potential market. So following this method,
00:25:52
Speaker
What I try to do is devise a business model, then I'm trying to design the machine to fit that business model. So prior to the last project, my thinking was that most of the archeological testing would be less than three meters along our rivers and here at least in Pennsylvania.
00:26:12
Speaker
Geez, it turns out my first client wanted to go at least three and a half meters or deeper. So I had to scramble to redesign the machine to actually go deeper. And I ended up with a capacity to go seven meters. So this is an example of you design the core features and build that and get it into the market as quickly as possible.
00:26:35
Speaker
Instead of trying to build every little feature and then miss the mark, you try to iterate as you go. So now what I'm wondering now, do I need to start thinking about building the machine to be more efficient at these deeper levels instead of the shallower depths? So that's what I'm thinking about right now. And I need to get a little more experience on some projects to see how this is going to play out. That'll affect my design decisions.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And how are you planning to monetize this? You plan on building out these systems or initially consulting and basically bringing your equipment onto a project site and using it that way? The idea of building it and selling it as a machine or as a product, I think probably isn't the way to go because it's a very limited market. And let's be honest, there's some archeology firms out there that
00:27:29
Speaker
they're pretty stingy on buying equipment for their crews. And I don't think they're going to spend $100,000 or more on a machine like this. Probably wouldn't even stop at that price. So my thinking is to instead of
00:27:47
Speaker
bidding on contracts and compete against the CRM firms out there offered as a service to these firms and some strategic partners with them. And whenever they get a project where it requires the deep testing, like this PennDOT project, I was just on the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, I was hired by an archaeology firm who had the contract, then I would go out and I would utilize their existing crew so they're not cut out of the process.
00:28:14
Speaker
And then it's kind of a partnership that eliminates some of the need for wall shoring and the expensive part of deep testing by hand, replacing that with something that's more safe. With my machine, you're not sitting someone down in that deep trench.
00:28:32
Speaker
Right. And that's key, right? I mean, you were mentioning, you know, one by ones and shoring after five feet. I mean, I've seen plenty of, you know, excavation units going down well past what OSHA would call safe as far as shoring goes. So yeah, anytime you can give them a tool that will just inherently be safer is actually a pretty good idea. I was also thinking, well, first off, I'm thinking, yes, contracting your services to CRM firms at a rate that
00:28:59
Speaker
has to compete with doing it by hand. I've got direct experience with that in the digital space that I'm in and saying, well, you can't just tell them, hey, this is just better data and more efficient and has to be able to directly compete finance-wise with what they're doing now. It has to meet or exceed whatever they're doing as far as be cheaper.
00:29:19
Speaker
but also be better. Then also possibly partnering with other firms that are doing similar things and just adding it to their tool set. What I mean by that is I was thinking of a friend of mine, Dan Bigman. He runs Bigman Geophysical. I think they're still based out of Georgia, but they work all over the world basically.
00:29:36
Speaker
They do a lot of ground for any trading radar and, you know, other geophysical methods. And this seems like the kind of thing that they might just like add to their list of offerings. You know what I mean? So almost like franchising out your equipment to places that do contract this out. Cause you would be hard pressed from Pennsylvania to contract this out to somebody in say, you know, South Carolina or Texas or something like that. You'd be driving all over the country.
00:30:02
Speaker
That's something I would consider though. Because there isn't enough work in Pennsylvania for deep testing to just, you know, survive on that. My idea is to go to other states. That's kind of what my plan is. Yeah. I remember doing some hand auger testing in South Carolina one time and we were going down four or five meters and still finding stuff. So there's definitely deep testing potential down there.
00:30:29
Speaker
All right. So, I mean, aside from all that, I mean, where, where do you want to take this business?
Future of PaleoDigger and Outreach Efforts
00:30:34
Speaker
You know, where, where would you see this in 10 years, for example? Well, the idea is to generate enough work that it can keep, keep on iterating and improving the technology. That's really important. I could see already thinking ahead to newer versions of this where that are built stronger and lighter. Mm-hmm.
00:30:55
Speaker
maybe have an actual engineering study done, make some improvements. I can take the engineering so far and then I'm limited on that end of it. But having a formal engineering study done and maybe improve the design
00:31:09
Speaker
and keep improving it to the point where it becomes a profitable business. And then also being able to set aside a certain block of time each year to do projects for nonprofits and archaeological groups that do more pure research types of things through the state societies and local chapters.
00:31:32
Speaker
Okay, nice. Have you presented on any of this at any local conferences or national conferences at all?
00:31:40
Speaker
Yes, I've presented at the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology Annual Meeting and I'll be presenting again this April at that meeting and then at the Eastern States Archaeological Federation Conference in November. I'll probably present that. I've published in Pennsylvania's State Journal here in Pennsylvania and then my, you know, my YouTube channel Archaeology X. I have a number of videos there on
00:32:09
Speaker
on using this machine. Yeah, let's talk about that. I only watched a couple of the videos on the machine. What do you plan to do with that channel overall? What's your goal with that? When you're doing this lean startup method model of developing a new product, you're trying to find a business model.
00:32:27
Speaker
And in order to test your idea, you need early adopters. You need clients. Put it in front of them and try it. So instead of developing the product in secret, the idea is to be completely open with it. And my videos basically lay out the whole idea how I came about the idea and how I progressed through the development of it and how it works.
00:32:53
Speaker
I did file a patent application and ultimately decided to public domain that application. So now it's, you know, there's no point in keeping a secret. I'd like the technology to grow and archaeology X is the way to get this out into the public and out into
00:33:11
Speaker
the CRM firms, and particularly the regulators, the folks who actually review the archaeology projects that we do in CRM. It's kind of difficult to change the status quo, especially with a disruptive technology. One of the problems I run into is a client might be interested in using the machine, but because it's not written into the standard methods in a state,
00:33:38
Speaker
you would have to submit the method for review before applying it. And the clients, they're almost always in a major hurry. They don't want to wait for a 30-day review period. So they'd rather move ahead with the standard methods and push through with that than try something new and wait for that review approval.
Regulatory Challenges in Archaeological Innovation
00:33:59
Speaker
So that's one of the hurdles I've run into with the regulatory bodies. Yeah, I hear you. That's a pretty common problem with lots of different things dealing with that. I work with a company we mentioned lots of times on this show called Wild Note. And I mean, dealing with regulatory institutions, basically, and making good exports and forms like we do to actually match up with that is not as simple as it would sound. So we feel your pain on that.
00:34:27
Speaker
All right. Well, I think, uh, you know, one, one last question on the archeology X channel, the, you named it archeology X and I was, I was curious about that. It almost sounds like an experimental archeology kind of thing, or maybe archeology X factor, like, you know, out there, crazy things. What other stuff do you think you want to put on that channel? If you had time to just produce videos and do things.
00:34:49
Speaker
Well, I, I coded archeology X kind of following after space X and the X prize. And the idea behind that is X in algebra is the unknown quantity. It's the problem to solve. So that's what the X represents. You're trying something new, disruptive.
00:35:05
Speaker
But I launched the channel to not only follow the Paleo Digger machine, but I would like to also do a segment, a series of videos that I'll call Digging Deeper, which you'll look at different sites and different projects, interviews, that kind of thing. And also doing archaeology. I plan to do a series of videos on basically how do you lay out one by one? So what's the math behind it? How do you map a rock shelter in the field?
00:35:35
Speaker
these kinds of things that often get overlooked in a field school. Because the field schools, they just don't have time to go through all these different kinds of techniques that we often use in a CRM survey. Yeah, that is true. That is true. Well, I'm looking forward to all the other things coming out on that. I've subscribed to the channel, of course, with my own YouTube account and looking forward to what you got coming out of there. Also really looking forward to seeing how the Paleo Digger
00:35:59
Speaker
evolves over through time as you use it. And I hope you get more CRM firms on board to do some real world testing with this. That should be pretty interesting. What I'm really after is those early sites, the first American sites, the pre Clovis. That's what we really want to dig into. So to speak. There you go.
00:36:20
Speaker
All right, Brian. Well, thanks a lot for coming on. And I'll tell you what, I'd love to have you back if you have any more updates or want to talk about new things this thing is doing or has found. And I'm really interested in stuff that maybe wouldn't have been found otherwise. That would be really cool. Yes, certainly. Yeah, man. When that happens, just contact us and we'll have you back on the show. Okay. Yeah, we'll do.
00:36:44
Speaker
All right. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Brian. And hopefully I've got another interview or two coming up this month for all our listeners. And Paul will be back at the end of March, early April. I can't remember exactly when and we'll, we'll be sure to update you on his, uh,
00:36:59
Speaker
Iraq travels and all the things he did over there. So be sure to check that out and check out our sponsors that you heard in the show and that are sitting in your show notes right now. Zencaster has been a really big supporter of us for the last few months and we want to keep that going. So if you want to start your own podcast, check out the Zencaster links in the show and there's a discount codes down there. And we hope that we can bring more people to this great platform. So with that, I'll sign off and we will see you next week.
00:37:31
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.
00:37:57
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, Rachel Rodin, Laura Johnson, Max Lander, and
00:38:15
Speaker
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.