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Past Archaeo “Tech”: Where Are They Now? - Ep 199
704 Plays1 year ago
We’re going through the tech and companies from the first 50 episodes of the ArchaeoTech podcast. Where are they now since we started this podcast in 2014? Some are still going strong and others have struggled or failed. Find out who did what on this episode.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/199
Links
- Open Context Episode 6
- Open Context
- FAIMS Mobile Recording Software - Episode 7
- FAIMS
- Field Technologies, Inc - Episode 8
- Field Technologies, Inc. - No Link
- SiteViewer - Episode 14
- SiteViewer redirects to Tactical Space Lab
- Codifi - Episode 34
- Codifi
- Dr. Dan Bigman and GPR - Episode 25
- Bigman Geophysical
- Lithodomos VR - Episode 45
- LIthodomos
Contact
- Chris Webster
Twitter: @archeowebby
Email: [email protected] - Paul Zimmerman
Twitter: @lugal
Email: [email protected]
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 199
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, episode 199. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we talk about the ghosts of Archaeotech past, its apps and services from the first 50 episodes, and what their status is now. Let's get to it.
Paul's Saudi Arabia Experience
00:00:24
Speaker
All right, welcome to the show, everybody. Paul, how's it going? Didn't expect to see you here today. Yeah, well, let's see.
00:00:31
Speaker
Well, perfect for a audio medium. Yeah, I'm pretty good. I've been out in the field a lot over the last year, and I keep on promising to try to talk to you when I'm in the field. And this time, I actually woke up when my alarm went off, and here we are. And I actually have internet for a little bit, so we'll see. Hopefully this continues. But right now, I'm back on another project in Saudi Arabia again, and I'm going to be here until probably early May. OK. Wow, that's a long time.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah. What's it like in the area that you're at? Is it sand dunes and dusty? Is it mountainous and tree? What's it look like? Oh, it's beautiful here. So we're living in a village just a little north of the city or village of Alola.
00:01:15
Speaker
which is kind of near Hegra, which is a famous Nabataean site. Any tourist thing that you'll see of Saudi Arabia will have these Nabataean facades. So that's up the street just about 10 minutes, 15 minutes from us. And then we have another very important site called Dedan that's just down the road. We drive past it on our way to work.
00:01:38
Speaker
sandstone cliff mountain craggy things with beautiful palm groves and it's just stunning where I'm at. I'm really lucky to be here.
00:01:48
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. And the archaeology is kind of cool too. Yeah. Well, that's cool. This is a CRM project you're on, not one of your academic projects. So as usual, there's probably not a whole lot you can say about it. Yeah, I'll have to do a little circumspect, but I think it's a little less sensitive than what I did out here in Saudi last year. So, you know, I've been put on a bunch of different projects. We're doing a little bit of survey work out in the desert, looking for site.
00:02:14
Speaker
And as of yesterday, I'm going to be doing some monitoring in the village here in the old city. And because it's Ramadan, it's going to start going to a night schedule. So I'm going to be looking at some burials. And yeah, just a few of us. So I've been joking that it's the skeleton crew working the graveyard shift doing burials. Because I couldn't hack any more dad jokes into one thing.
00:02:46
Speaker
Wow. So what are you at,
Chris's Mexico Stay and Travel Plans
00:02:48
Speaker
Chris? Well, we are still in Mexico as we're recording this. I don't think we're in Mexico as you're listening to this, but I'm trying to think. I guess this probably goes out next week. I don't know. Either way, we're leaving at the end of March and we'll have been here for two months, just a couple of days over two months, which is really the longest we've spent anywhere except for wild horse campground during those projects we did out in Nevada with you.
00:03:13
Speaker
We were there for like three months, I think, in that location. But as we've been traveling around, aside from that archaeology project, this is the longest we've sat anywhere. And it's so nice. We just like had no compulsion to leave because, you know, we were supposed to be up in Arizona near the Grand Canyon right now and it was just cold and snowy up there. And instead we just kind of pushed everything back a month. And now we're going to go.
00:03:35
Speaker
up into Arizona for the first, well, Northern Arizona for the first couple of weeks of April. And then we're doing another RV gathering thing about the third week of April. And then once that's over, we're headed towards California and then up the California coast up into the Pacific Northwest for the summertime and then, uh, you know, moving on from there. So.
Revisiting Early Tech and Podcast Milestones
00:03:54
Speaker
We are going to talk about past tech on this show. For other reasons related to the Archeology Podcast Network, I was actually going through all of our old shows for every single show on the network. I had to run through all of our old shows right back from episode one and make some changes on the website.
00:04:13
Speaker
Which you might notice, actually, if you ever go to our website and listen to shows, what I had to change was the player that's there. The thing that allows you to actually just play the episode right on the website or actually download it from the website. We moved our hosting service to Zencaster, so the old megaphone player from all hosting service no longer worked. And I had to remove that from about 2,500 shows and then add the new Zencaster player to all the shows. And along the way, took a look at some stuff. And I thought it would be fun to do an episode
00:04:42
Speaker
using just the first 50 episodes of archaeotech, that's where we stopped. So we're not singling these companies out. This is literally any company or app or thing that was the major focus of the episode from the first 50 episodes of archaeotech. Now, if some of you go back and listen to these, because we do have links to all this stuff in the show notes,
00:05:01
Speaker
some of the really early ones, possibly even the first one we talk about here. I don't think so though. I think that's when I took over the first few episodes had different hosts and then they kind of bailed on it. And then I took over for a little while and I had a host named Chris Sims and I had him for a while and then he left and then the show kind of languished for, I don't know, probably a year without any episodes before I started doing just a handful of things. And then Paul came on board and you've been on board for, it's gotta be at least 150 episodes. I don't know.
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, I was looking back. I can't recall when I started. I think it was in the 60s or 80s, somewhere in that range. So all these ones predated. But a lot of these people have been on multiple times. So as we discussed, I was on interviews with a few of them later on because, you know,
00:05:47
Speaker
Quite a few of them have ongoing projects and they were active and still are, in many cases, very active and keep on going. But before we go any farther, Chris, though, I do want to point out this is episode 199. Don't people normally do things like this on the anniversary or milestone episodes, like 200 maybe instead of 199? What's going on here?
00:06:09
Speaker
You know, I, I have been so bad in the whole history of the archeology podcast network about like celebrating episode number milestones. I really want to do stuff, you know, like an episode 200 do a, this would be a good episode 200. You're totally right. Instead, we're going to talk about, you know, basically dogs and person sniffing dogs.
00:06:29
Speaker
cadaver dogs and things like that. We're bringing on Paul Martin, who was mentioned, I believe, in one of our past episodes where we were talking about a CRM project down in the South, where they were looking for some stuff, some bridge foundations, and they actually thought they had a burials there, and they brought in these cadaver dogs. And Paul Martin was one of the ones that was brought in to manage that.
00:06:50
Speaker
So we're going to talk to him directly on the show. But you know, I would like to do some of this other stuff. We've got some big changes coming with the APN and it might allow us to staff up a little bit within the next year or two and give us a little more freedom to be able to, you know, have the time to really put some of these episodes together because
00:07:09
Speaker
I'll tell you what, it is a lot of work because you have to figure out what you're going to put in, like a compilation episode, what you're going to talk about. And if you're pulling any clips, you got to go back and find those and cut them and put them in the new one. It's just a, it is a mountain of work. So yeah, I want to do it, but we're going to have to wait.
00:07:26
Speaker
Okay, so we're just going to talk about some of these for the bulk of the episode and let's get into it. Again, we're not picking on any of these. This is literally just any website software or service that we talked about in the first 50 episodes. Everything else is probably news articles or papers or journal articles or something like that.
Open Context for Archaeological Data
00:07:44
Speaker
So the first one
00:07:46
Speaker
is open context. And some people may have heard of open context. I mean, it started, I think it started well before we started talking about it on this episode, which was episode six of the Archaeotech podcast. And this episode actually dates from February 9th, 2015.
00:08:01
Speaker
That's when we interviewed Eric Kanza of Open Context, one of the founders, him and his wife, and a few other people were the founders of this, and they're still the people who are primarily running it. So what do you know about Open Context, Paul? You know, I remember finding out about it back probably when I was writing my dissertation or maybe shortly after. So that would have been, oh, well, my dissertation was 2008. So, you know, it's been a long time, 15 plus years now.
00:08:30
Speaker
And the consas I know are very active in a lot of different things related to archaeological data, as they should be, because they are legitimately experts in it. And their regular articles by them still come out. Open context.
00:08:45
Speaker
trying to recall why I was looking at it and I think that it was because I was very curious and still am as you well know in how one manages the reams of data that we get from archaeological projects and they were and again still are at the forefront of managing and
00:09:07
Speaker
implementing systems for doing so. I'm trying to remember what the relationship between open context and TDAR because we also had Chris Nicholson from TDAR and I know that these two projects are related and they are both active and still going strong. Chris Nicholson I interact with occasionally or did I think when I
00:09:33
Speaker
was on Twitter before the Elon Muskification of it all. How about you? How did you end up reaching out to them for that?
00:09:47
Speaker
You know, I think I met Eric at a conference because he knew Michael Ashley, who I knew at the time. Yeah. And we'll talk about codifying a little bit, but I'm pretty sure, yeah, I either talked to him at a conference or something like that. It was an SAA or something like that. And just started talking and, and, and ended up getting him on for an interview. So that's how I remember Eric. I'm sorry. Yeah. Eric Kanza.
00:10:10
Speaker
He also did a poster one time and it was a late night poster session on like a Thursday or I think it was a Friday night. Actually it was a late night. I was getting over like 10 o'clock at night and I even want to say this was the, was this the Hawaii essays? I can't remember which one it was, but it was, um,
00:10:27
Speaker
late at night and a bunch of us were standing there talking to him and actually just kind of talking to each other and we were getting kicked out of the poster room because they were closing it up and everybody else had pretty much left but we're all just sitting there chatting about tech and stuff like that and his poster was still sitting on the poster wall on like the court board or whatever that they roll into hang the posters on and he just like while talking pulled the pins out of his poster and it turns out it was a piece of cloth and he just like he just like bunched it up and stuffed it in his bag
00:10:58
Speaker
It still is like one of my primary memories of Eric. And it was just like, what? And everybody was like, what the hell is this? You don't have a big tube? And no, he had it printed on like high quality fabric. And it was just genius. So anyway, yeah. And I ended up meeting up with him at Berkeley, I think, too, and had lunch with him when I was over there for whatever reason one time. And yeah, he's just a really cool guy. And that's where him and Sarah live. His wife is over in Berkeley. At least they used to. I don't know. That was years ago.
00:11:26
Speaker
But anyway, yeah, this is really cool. And, you know, I don't know if they're related to TDAR, but I do know they are related to DINA, which is the Digital Index of North American Archaeology. Yeah. You know what? I think that I asked Chris Nicholson if both the relationship was and he said that they didn't do the exact same thing so that they were actually complimentary, that they were friends, that they, you know, they discuss things a lot. But
00:11:53
Speaker
my first experience with open context. I remember now I was looking online and I saw it and I found that one of the earliest things that was uploaded to it was data from the site of Petra in Jordan, which I had worked on. So I had this early kind of unexpected connection with it.
00:12:10
Speaker
Nice. Nice. Yeah. When I was doing research for this episode, I, I played around on there a little bit. You can just like look at their map and start zooming in and zoom all the way down and it's searchable too, but you can just kind of play around and zoom in and look at stuff. And again, these are all
00:12:25
Speaker
Well, like it says, these are all typically open access type of things that, you know, you can know, it doesn't tell you exactly where things are. They scrub coordinates and they have a really big grid square that says it's somewhere here and it's, and it's big enough that you're never going to find it. So, you know, anything identifying, they really take out, but it is really cool that, you know, there's, there's drawings and photographs and, you know, notes and, and whatever people have submitted to this and they've got it in a really,
00:12:50
Speaker
searchable database. One of the things they've done is they're really, really concerned with getting the language right. Coming up with common terms for things and making sure that that's consistent across the entire platform. They don't let just anybody upload data here. You send the data to them and they upload the data after they contextualize all your data in their system. That's incredibly important.
00:13:14
Speaker
Makes it very easy. And I just found the Petra Gray temple excavations on their site. So I know that's still there. Nice. I haven't dug into the actual data they have here, but I see that the project is there. So my faulty memory is maybe a little less faulty than I thought. Nice, nice. All right. Well, this next one might take
Evolution of the FAMES App
00:13:34
Speaker
a minute to discuss. So I think let's go ahead and take a break and we'll start that one on the other side back in a minute.
00:13:40
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 199 of the Arceotech podcast. And we are about to talk about another product that I was actually pretty excited to hear about when it first started, or at least when we were talking to them, which was a few years after they first started. And it's called Fames. And man, I'll have to look on here and see what this actually, oh, it now stands for
00:14:02
Speaker
field acquired information management systems. I swear, I think they came up with that because they wanted to keep the name of Fames because they had branding for that, because I'm pretty sure it used to mean something like federated, archaeological, something or other, because it was designed specifically for archaeology by archaeologists back when it was first started in Australia, no less.
00:14:24
Speaker
But now they've kind of pivoted, which is smart, incredibly smart. They've pivoted to being an electronic field notebook for basically anybody, right? So it's essentially open source software and you can use this on, it's Android based, I believe, and you can use it based on whatever you want to collect essentially. And I don't even know if they charge anything for it, to be honest with you. They may, but
00:14:48
Speaker
I'm not seeing anything here. Yeah, but it's pretty cool software. Yeah. Your faulty memory is not terribly faulty because I just looked at, get this, I searched on the arc pod net architect page in the search box for fame's. Okay. Because you've told people about that before, right? And came up with the answer right there, episode seven, federated archeology information management system.
00:15:14
Speaker
There you go. So they did want to use the same acronym. They just came up with different words for it. Field acquired. I like it. I like it. So yeah, which makes sense. Yeah, exactly. This is pretty cool. And it looks like they've rolled out relatively recently, fame's 3.0, which honestly doesn't sound like a too high of a number for being around for, you know,
00:15:37
Speaker
something like 13 years. I don't know how many iterations they think they've gone through, but yeah, 3.0. It says also enables cross-platform data collection, Android, iOS, and desktop, and more flexible synchronization and integration with other platforms as well. So it sounds like they are doing a lot of things. The production version of Fames 3.0 just went live on December 22nd, sorry, December 2022.
00:16:01
Speaker
And you can subscribe to their newsletter and find out all kinds of stuff. But we'll have, again, links for these if you want to check it out. Because I can't imagine this is limited to Australia either, but they have opened it up to a lot of different fields. And we had to reach out to them again, too, because it'd be nice to find out what they've done in the interim, why they've rebranded a little bit, and where they see themselves going, since it's still going strong, apparently.
00:16:25
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. And again, says it was started here in 2012. And if I, again, I'm guessing here because I'm trying to remember, but I think it was started almost as like a, like a project by grad students, right? To, to develop this. And I don't know if they turned it into a company or if somebody else did, but
00:16:44
Speaker
there, there must be either some funding behind this or you do actually pay for it. I honestly can't really tell just by looking at this, but you know, they're keeping it going and they're keeping a website maintained and they're keeping it updated. So that takes resources one way or another. Yep.
00:16:59
Speaker
Cool. All right.
Field Technologies Inc. Disappearance
00:17:00
Speaker
Well, that's a cool one. Yeah, we'll try to get those ones on. The next one's going to be pretty quick. Field Technologies Incorporated. Again, that's what we call the episode title, essentially, but can't find anything. And Chris Cameron. Cool.
00:17:14
Speaker
is the person who started Field Technologies Incorporated. I actually talked to him a few times. I think I did a Profiles in CRM with him back when I was doing that podcast. I talked to him a couple of times about different things. He was pretty hot a few years ago in the archaeo-field text group and a few other archaeology groups on Facebook.
00:17:34
Speaker
because he was doing two things that I was very aware of. He was the first thing, which I think is what we talked about in this episode, which was March 23rd, 2015, episode eight of The Architect podcast. And I'm really kind of sad that I can't find anything now. And he may have renamed it and it's still there. I just can't find it by searching Field Technologies Incorporated.
00:17:56
Speaker
I also can't really find any posts from him on Facebook or in any group on Facebook. We're still friends, but he hasn't posted on Facebook in three, four years. So he's essentially left the platform. So I literally have no idea what's going on with all this.
00:18:11
Speaker
But like I said, two cool things that I thought he was doing, he was creating an application for basically cataloging shovel test pits, STPs, because he's based out of North Carolina. I mean, shovel test pits in the Southeast United States, that's like all you do out there.
00:18:27
Speaker
Right. I mean, you do lead to further excavations, but shovel test pits is like, you know, that's equals survey out of here in the West, right? It's just SDPs, SDPs. You'll dig thousands of them in a field season. It is nuts. So finding better ways to catalog these things is the name of the game.
00:18:44
Speaker
And then he was also trying to develop basically a machine learning AI tool for identifying projectile points, where essentially you'd take a picture of a projectile point and it would tell you all about it. And he was asking people for pictures of points so he could put it in this machine learning system and have it learn those known points.
00:19:02
Speaker
Do you remember seeing anything about that? I remember hearing about that on the podcast. I remember that episode and I remember you've mentioned it a number of times because it was really cool. It was kind of building off of the same thing that we now have. Oh, I'm trying to remember who's behind it, but the different plant identifier apps.
00:19:23
Speaker
So you take a picture and it tells you, yes, that's one. That was the big one. But there have been dozens of these sorts of things, probably bird ones, but definitely a lot of plant ones, identifying flowers and leaves and such. And so he was trying to do that for, well, like you said, for lithics, which makes a lot of sense, I mean, for, you know, if you've got the entire form. But yeah, I haven't heard anything since.
00:19:51
Speaker
Well, let's, let's talk about that technically. He may have stopped doing that project because it might not be technically possible to solidly 100% or at least with a high confidence, high degree of confidence, identify a projectile point. I've often thought about this cause I, I've worked in as you have at this point now, even just in the last few years of doing CRM, you know, you've worked in a number of different places in the country, you know, from
00:20:15
Speaker
West Coast to East Coast at this point. I've worked in at least 18 different states, seen projectile points in every single one of them. And I'll tell you what, everybody has their own regional names and terminologies for these things. But there's not a whole lot of ways to make a projectile point, right? I mean, you've got your side notches and your quarter notches, you've got different lengths, widths, thicknesses, base shapes, and things like that.
00:20:37
Speaker
But like a certain point name over on in the West in California, you might have that exact same shape of point over in South Carolina. It's just, you know, it might even be made of the same things. Actually in South Carolina, it's probably courts or something like that. And in California, it's probably, you know, obsidian.
00:20:56
Speaker
something. But either way, aside from material type, you know, there's also only a handful of material types that are typically made into projectile points as far as the mass collection of those go across this country. I just wonder if it was too hard. You know what I mean? Like there's such subtle differences between some of these things. And I don't think we have a hundred percent degree of confidence when we even type those for sites. You know, I mean, some of them are real obvious, like we're going to drop it in this category.
00:21:22
Speaker
But then others, it's like, oh my God, it could be on a line between this one and that one. You know what I mean? So even having a computer do it, I think would be hard. Well, I think that if you added a spatial component to it, that might help a little bit with that. Sure.
00:21:38
Speaker
If you restricted to the terminology and the materials and the, well, the typology, the chronology of it all based off of where you are. If you're in the Northeast, don't bother looking at stuff from the Southwest. That may help that a little bit, but really, this is way above anything I would even know how to tackle because I'm not particularly good at lithics.
00:22:03
Speaker
Well, I have always been interested and I don't know if anybody's ever done this kind of study, but cause people always tend to focus locally and regionally on what they're doing. But I would love to be interested in a, in a United States wide, you know, typology study on projectile point morphology and I guess a morphological study. Cause I would really like to know, you know, you've got this one shape like the Elko corner notch in Nevada. I mean, it was used for,
00:22:29
Speaker
thousand plus years and is everywhere. You can't walk somewhere in Nevada without finding an Elko corner notch. If it's so common, I want to know how common that shape is across the rest of the country and what other people call it. You know what I mean? And look at the date ranges where you find that same exact shape in all different states of the country and say,
00:22:52
Speaker
You can almost see the cultural march of that shape if it truly started in one place or if it was independently, independently invented, so to speak. I don't know what the other word would be, but created or shaped in different locations. That would be super interesting. But man, what an effort that would be to create. Yeah, I can. I'm sure somebody's tried it. And again, I don't know much about lithics, so I don't know where to start with the research. Maybe it exists already. I just have never seen it.
00:23:21
Speaker
Nice. Nice. All right. Well, there's a, there's a project for some, you know, grad student out there that's looking for something. Tackle that one. Okay. Somebody else do this work for me. Thanks. Somebody else. All right. So the next one, honestly, I'm a little confused on, uh, cause I haven't really dug into
Site Viewer Development Halt
00:23:40
Speaker
it too much. I really need to listen to the episode again, but it was called site viewer from episode 14, which episode 14 came out on August 10th, 2015.
00:23:50
Speaker
And there's now a website called tacticalspace.org that is housing site viewer. They're doing a bunch of other things it looks like, but they still have the site viewer application. And as far as I can tell, it's a way to bring, what did they say? It's a way to bring photo scan models into other devices because apparently you can't just bring those in as something you can save out of photo scan. I don't really know. Unless this is just old and has never been updated because the GitHub data
00:24:19
Speaker
Was from 2015 and I don't know how get to have data updates does it update when something changes or is that just like the upload date? I really couldn't tell because I don't know a whole lot about GitHub, but I don't know. Can you make anything out of this Paul? Yeah, so no, I really don't know what's going on with that. Also, it seems like a problem that is an old problem. Not a now problem.
00:24:41
Speaker
I've seen 3D models and such in your iPad or whatever because there are lots of different ways to do that now. But for your GitHub question, it doesn't mean that it's not actively used. It means that change or actively developed rather, it means that whatever development changes haven't been pushed to GitHub.
00:25:02
Speaker
which could be that it's not being actively developed. It could mean that they've moved to a different hosting platform for their Git files. They've moved out to Bitbucket. I can't think of the other big one right at the moment, but it doesn't mean that it's dead. But that said, it probably does mean that it's dead, the development of it.
00:25:26
Speaker
Well, I mean the website references the GitHub files and nothing else. So that tells me that it either hasn't been updated or, you know, something else is going on. Yeah. Maybe it's in deep freeze. Might be, might be. All
History of Codify and Changes
00:25:40
Speaker
right. Well, we've got a few more things to talk about. So let's take our final break and come back and do that on segment three back in a minute.
00:25:46
Speaker
Welcome back to the Arceotech podcast. We're talking about past tech from the first 50 episodes of the Arceotech podcast. And the next thing we're going to talk about is Codify. We have mentioned Codify a lot of times on the show.
00:25:59
Speaker
a lot. Yeah. I mean, they were, and probably still are, I don't know. It's difficult to say what's going on with the company now, but just a little bit of history and full disclosure too. So, I first heard about Codify, again, at a conference, an SAA conference, when I saw Michael Ashley giving a
00:26:16
Speaker
about Codify and some of the things that they were doing. And at the time, Codify was basically, it was FileMaker-based because he's a high-end FileMaker developer. I mean, Michael Ashley is a FileMaker whiz. I mean, if they have something called a master FileMaker developer, he would be it if he's not already, right? I mean, he's a wizard with that kind of thing. Yeah. And so, you know, I talked to him and I was doing a project up north.
00:26:42
Speaker
Clear Lake, I think it was in, in California. And rather than I think going home one weekend, cause I was Monday through Friday and I was like driving back to Reno some weekends rather than just staying there. I drove down to San Rafael where his offices were, which is just on the other side of the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco. And
00:27:01
Speaker
we met up at his offices and did a podcast interview. There was a couple of people working there. It was called codify.org at the time. Uh, it's now codify.com, but codify was a, I guess it was more of a bespoke tool for academics and academic projects. Like people would come to him and say, we would like to use this for this. And they would essentially use, you know, their platform broken down to like, you know,
00:27:26
Speaker
50, 60% completion and then customize the rest of it for that client. And that's what they would use it for. Another client would come along, they use a stripped down version and customize the rest of it for that client. But the same basic principles were there and how it functioned and operated. But yeah, there was a bunch of people working there, at least probably 10 employees. They were doing really well, doing all kinds of things. And I remember saying when the podcast interview was over,
00:27:51
Speaker
Why aren't you guys doing this for CRM? Because you could basically standardize everything for certain states, not have to do bespoke projects anymore, and then just sell it. That actually sparked off Codify as a separate company because I can't remember what Codify was actually under. It was a sub-company of another one that he had.
00:28:09
Speaker
And I can't remember what it was called. It will probably come to me. But either way, Codify, he spun off as a separate company in order to effectively do that. And I joined him kind of as a consultant. And basically, we had lots of discussions about CRM, particularly the California DPRs, which are their site forms. And then the Nevada IMAX form, the California DPR one was the big one that we started with. And really developing Codify for that. And we developed it for a while.
00:28:37
Speaker
At some point we ended up parting ways, you know, just had some differences on the platform and things like that. And if you ever want to know that, just, you know, we can have a beer at a conference or something and I'll tell you all about it. But if I haven't already mentioned all that on this show already. Anyway, at some point they were purchased a few years ago by Paleo West.
00:28:55
Speaker
which again, there's another story back there that I could tell you all about, but they were purchased by Paleo West. And then just recently, it was actually on Michael's LinkedIn profile. I saw it. They've taken it out of Paleo West. So I don't know if he bought it back from them or if they just parted ways or whatever happened, but now Codify is independent again. So I don't know exactly what's going on. They still have a website codify.com. There's a contact form on here. So that presumably goes to Michael or somebody, but there's not really a lot of information about
00:29:25
Speaker
how you can use it right now and what you do, what you get if you contact them. So I'm not 100% certain what's happening there. Do you have any more insight on that, Paul?
00:29:34
Speaker
No more insight. It's curious to me because I met him, Michael, that is, I met him last summer on the project I was working on in Saudi. Great guy. Yeah. I had very interesting conversations with him, really nose his tech, really thoughtful, intelligent, dedicated to this. I'm so dedicated to this. He's got a big codified tattoo on his arm and the logo. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I remember when he got that.
00:30:03
Speaker
Yeah, so he's all in. And then I just found out about the, I don't know, I don't know what the right term is, spun off from, released from a party of ways of some kind and I haven't really bothered to dig in because
00:30:20
Speaker
I hope that it's all amicable and was a good thing for all parties because that kind of strife, really, I have troubles dealing with. So I'm hoping they saw an opportunity and everybody said, yes, this is the right way forward for everybody. And he's filtering up his company to continue in the direction that he needs it to go. We used the software and it worked totally fine for me. I thought it was a good idea. I had no complaints about it.
00:30:50
Speaker
I don't know what else to add though. Yeah. You know, that's the interesting thing is, yeah, we're not really sure what happened or what you can do with codify. But again, I can tell you there is a website, there's a connect box so you can email whomever is on the other end of that line and say, Hey, I'm interested in this and, uh, you know, talk to them about it and see what's going on. So if we had more information, I would probably give you more information, but we don't.
00:31:12
Speaker
This next one's pretty cool, and I'm so happy to see where this has gone.
Bigman Geophysical's Expansion
00:31:17
Speaker
But on episode 25, and that was back in March 7th, 2016, we interviewed, that was probably me and Chris Sims, interviewed Dr. Dan Bigman.
00:31:28
Speaker
I first met Dan when I was in grad school at the University of Georgia in Athens in 2009, 2010. And in fact, I remember meeting him a number of times in the laboratory of anthropology that we had there. And then also, I think him and his wife, they used to have like parties and stuff. And I remember going over there for like a Christmas party or something where I think is the first time I made my eggnog that I've made literally every year since then. I found this one recipe that's just amazing. And
00:31:56
Speaker
It's highly asked for, whoever's had it before. It's not my recipe. I found it at some point and just started making it every single year since then.
00:32:06
Speaker
But yeah, Dan, Dan is a super cool guy, very high energy. He's just like, you know, hopping all over the place. Yeah. I mean, it's, it seems like he's just like wound super tight, but he is so smart with all this remote sensing and geophysical stuff. And his company started as it's Bigman geophysical and his company started as, I mean, really just doing GPR for other people.
00:32:28
Speaker
right? So he bought the equipment and he was doing GPR for other people, ground penetrating radar, and then started teaching people how to use their own equipment and doing onsite classes, putting together YouTube videos and really being proactive and telling people how to maximize their use out of these things that they may or may not know how to use.
00:32:45
Speaker
again, started just doing it for people and being contracted out. And at some point they obviously got into other geophysical methods and then was teaching people how to use those. They rent equipment. And now you look at their website and there's just about, there's just about nothing in that like remote sensing space that they don't do, you know? I mean, they do pretty much everything. And what I love about him is he's really focused on empowering people to do this and teaching them about it. And it's not just a company that's going out there and doing these things. They're really teaching people how to do it.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm on his company's mailing list and I regularly get emails about different classes and workshops that they're giving. It seems like it's mostly targeted now towards civil engineers, that sort of thing. But obviously, if you're learning how to do GPR and analyze the data for a civil engineering firm, you could take that same stock of knowledge and apply it for archaeology too. So,
00:33:41
Speaker
you know, there's still value for archeologists. So I think he's focused on, you know, people with deeper pockets. Well, and honestly, because we've interviewed him a couple of times at least, and that's one of the ones you were on, Paul. It was just a few years ago. And I remember talking to him about that because he was like, you know, he said it the nicest way possible, but the building a business and having employees and trying to make payroll, the work is just not there in archeology.
00:34:05
Speaker
There's just not enough of it to make this sustainable. So they started looking out of archaeology. And one of the things I remember him mentioning was using GPR to find pipes and utility lines and stuff like that underneath roads and other things where they're going to dig or do something. They need to know where everything is and just doing that and teaching people how to do that and things like that. So yeah, totally made sense that they went out of archaeology and started broadening their horizons in order to build the company because you almost have to.
00:34:34
Speaker
All right. Well, that's a cool one. Again, Bigman Gio. Link is in the show notes. Go check it out. And, you know, he's got a link actually in there. One more thing I'll mention here. He's got a link for the podcast. I clicked on that and I was going, are you really started a podcast? But
00:34:50
Speaker
He's kind of using podcasts incorrectly because it goes to a YouTube channel and it doesn't look like they've posted over there in a little while, but he was doing some really cool things, you know, talking to different people. I think they called it the, uh, the GPR hot seat or something like that. And it was kind of a cool little series of YouTube videos. So go check that out. And they probably have some other stuff over there as well. Again, really focused on teaching and learning. Okay.
00:35:13
Speaker
So this last one we're going to talk about, these guys have gone through a number of changes and it's a Lithodomos VR and they don't even really call themselves Lithodomos VR anymore.
Lithodomos VR's Broader Focus
00:35:23
Speaker
It's just Lithodomos.com now. And, uh, because it's not necessarily VR anymore, which is the other interesting thing. This is another Australia based company. Site Viewer was Australia. Thames was Australia. And I don't know what's going on down there, but they're, they're really tech forward. And I love it, but don't you, um, Australian company.
00:35:48
Speaker
I don't know. It's kind of crazy, right? When I first heard about Lithodomos VR, I can't actually remember how I came in contact with Simon, who is the founder of Lithodomos VR. Somehow we were put together and we did an interview. And again, that was episode 45 aired on January 26th, 2017. And the company was really at its infancy at that point. He was a newly minted PhD, if I remember right, and was kicking this off because it was based on something he did in his dissertation.
00:36:09
Speaker
What did I do? A tech company.
00:36:17
Speaker
in how to view these famous, they were starting with Roman sites and things like that, the big hitters. And I remember it was really based around the Google Cardboard, if you remember that. And I don't even know if you can still get a Google Cardboard, but they'll ship you one for 12 bucks. I got one free at a Google event in Reno. And it's this flat thing. You fold it out into an old Viewmaster type of deal.
00:36:40
Speaker
and you put your iPhone in it or your Android phone, you fire up their app, and it's got the stereoscopic vision. And there's a little button on the Google Cardboard that actually triggers, I think it's your volume up button or something like that, depending on how your phone is laid out. And essentially,
00:36:56
Speaker
you've got a little, like a little pointer right in your center field of vision. And you can look at different things. You can say, I want to go this way. So you look that direction and hit the button and moves you that direction. So you're actually walking through and then clicking on these information things where you're hearing narration or you'll hear sounds of what it could have been like in this photo realistic virtual reality type of environment, right? It's kind of fake virtual reality, but it's virtual reality.
00:37:21
Speaker
Well, now you go to their page and they're not exactly doing that anymore. They do have some of that. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of their destinations page, you can see that they've still got a few that support Google Cardboard because they've got the picture right on there for Google Cardboard. And then they've got one destination. I think it's ancient Athens for the Oculus Quest, which I mean, if they're doing anything, they should move everything to the Oculus Quest. But I think they realized early on that the novelty of doing this through something like Google Cardboard
00:37:49
Speaker
was not a good business model. It's not sustainable. It's not something that people are just going to use all the time. But now it's really just either desktop or phone or tablet-based, browser-based. You pay $6 for a different city or something you want to see.
00:38:08
Speaker
And you can essentially use it from your living room or you can actually use it while you're walking around the city. You're walking around Lisbon, Portugal. You can pull this thing up and have your headphones in and then see where you're at if it's on their map looked like.
00:38:23
Speaker
at a certain period of history with sounds and narration from qualified academics and just digital reconstructions of things that aren't there anymore or maybe things that are in ruin. And it actually looks pretty cool. And I want to really kind of plan some travel around some of this stuff. It's all in, you know, none of it's in the United States.
00:38:42
Speaker
It's all over in Europe and the Middle East and around there. I don't know. I want to check some of this out. We had them back on again for episode 108. I wasn't here for the episode 45, but I was for 108. As it so happened, they were coming to New York shortly after the interview.
00:39:02
Speaker
And the school that I was working at was using those cardboards. Actually, we did start with the cardboard ones, but we moved onto plastic ones later on. And eventually, I think they got some oculuses. I'm not sure that happened.
00:39:17
Speaker
toward the end of my time there. But because these guys were in town, they came and they had a meeting with some of the guys from my department about designing content specifically for use in school. And what they had when they were really showing off, what they were showcasing at the time was a whole workflow that went, you know, so they could quickly and efficiently, and I got to say beautifully, do these renderings.
00:39:41
Speaker
with a pedagogical aim and component to them, which melded really well with what we were using VR for in the school environment, K through 12, mostly middle school, high school, but also I think the lower school was using them some too.
00:39:58
Speaker
I don't know that we ended up hiring them for any particular project, but there was some active discussions and some back and forth going on about what they could do, what Lithodomos could do that the school was willing to pay for. And the school was definitely looking at it because like I said, it was good quality content and it was not just the beautiful renderings, but also, you know, Andan package.
00:40:25
Speaker
Having talked to them, I really believed what he was telling me about the workflow that they had. They had specialists at each stage so they could bring a project in as an idea and pop it out the other end as a fully-formed, fully-executed, well-designed final product of VR. Not just rendering, because there were animations going on during these.
00:40:49
Speaker
So a little more like a video game kind of context, but with a lot, again, with a learning component, with a lot of annotations and a guided sense about how one would move through a space, through a city, to see what you could see.
00:41:07
Speaker
Yeah. And, and that's, yeah, that's what I love about it. You know, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of historical accuracy that they're trying to go for. Yeah. And that's really cool. So definitely we'll definitely check it out. I remember when I was looking at this website earlier today to just kind of refresh some of my research on this, I ended up on a page that actually had all their deaf destinations with a price listed on there. And I'm in English and the price was listed in you. Well, it said dollars. I actually don't know if that was us dollars or Australian dollars, but it said six.
00:41:37
Speaker
which it's relatively close right now. So $6 per destination. Yeah, exactly. That's the Australian dollar. Exactly. Yeah, totally. But now I can't find that page. I don't know what pathway took me to that page, but now I can't find it. But if you do click on their destinations page, you can actually sample some of these things. And it's actually kind of cool the way that they did the webpage too, because
00:42:01
Speaker
your mouse as you're navigating the page is actually moving the background behind it in conjunction with the mouse, which is really kind of neat. I've never seen a webpage do that before.
00:42:12
Speaker
Anyway, super cool company, definitely support them. Full disclosure, they did sponsor some ads or they had some ads on the RQLG Podcast Network, I think a couple of times when they were really trying to do some heavy promotions. So I really appreciated that. Yeah, I'm glad to see they're still up and running and I really want to go somewhere where I can use one of their destinations and use it in real time. But of course I might just try one of these from the comfort of my own couch or try to find that Oculus app. I'm going to go in there and check that out. So, all right, anything else Paul?
00:42:43
Speaker
No, I mean, again, this was all stuff from before my time, but it's also a lot of the stuff that got me first listening to this podcast and other podcasts on the network and then eventually, you know, becoming the co-host on this one.
00:42:58
Speaker
It was hearing all these discussions and these interviews with people that had neat ideas and were actually trying to execute them and I was filled with jealousy listening to these so often back then because I was doing something that was out of archaeology and oh, if I could just do my tech stuff in archaeology, it'd be so cool. Well, I'm glad somebody else is doing it and now I'm back in it and I'm glad that a lot of them are still going strong.
00:43:23
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome. And on some of the stuff you're doing, you're actually able to take some of these things and, and, and bring them into, to what you're doing, which is really cool. Like the Lagash project and things like that. So yeah, that's really awesome. A conjunction of those things.
00:43:38
Speaker
Okay. Well, at some point in the future, I can't tell you when I specifically stopped looking at 50 episodes because we'd already had enough. And I might just do other chunks because we've got, well, four chunks of 50 episodes now. And, uh, I'd love to go through some of those others. Oh my goodness. See where they're at. I know getting really close to episode 200. So, all right. Well, with that, we will see you guys later. I don't know if Paul's going to have the internet or the schedule to make it next time with our interview with Paul Martin, but hopefully he can.
00:44:06
Speaker
Otherwise it might just be me and Paul, Paul Martin, I should say, uh, not, uh, Paul Zimmerman. And we'll do that otherwise. Good luck. Thanks. Yeah, totally. All right. We'll see everybody next time. Bye.
00:44:27
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.
00:44:53
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 Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.