LiDAR News

A comprehensive site for news about LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), brought to my attttention by Meg Watters (thanks, Meg!).  Tremendous resource for this form of remote sensing.   News, articles, fora, blog – the works.

Landscape Research Centre

The Landscape Research Centre Atlas of the Archaeology of the Vale of Pickering (http://www.landscaperesearchcentre.org/atlas/LRC_Atlas.html) presents “…the interpretations of more than three decades of landscape observation and research using air-photography and geophysics to map the archeaology of parts of the Vale of Pickering” via a Google Earth plug-in.  Datasets include results of geophysical investigations, and a slider feature to select dates of interest.  The text noted that datasets would appear as a left-click option, although I was unable to get that feature to work.

I liked the use of the Google Earth plug-in, and especially the date slider feature (there seems to be a way to select a range of dates, although I found this to be sticky).

Websites of Interest

From time to time, websites presenting geospatial research come across our desks.  This space will be for capturing those examples of our and other’s hard work, and for sharing amongst the group.  If you have something roll your way, feel free to post (IG members may receive authorial priviledges upon request), or submit to me for posting.  You may say as little or as much in way of a review.  Let’s see what’s out there!

Convergence

Convergence – it is a word that has been on my mind a lot these days.  Perhaps it is my new-found freedom from administrative duties; perhaps it is a product of my growing facility with geospatial computing; but I feel as if more and more applications and tools are becoming not only more relevant to each other, but necessary for our work going forward.

When I seriously began using GIS, I saw my own approaches to the geospatial world as separate from other applications such as 3-D reconstructions in CAD or the use of the new-fangled Google Earth.  I could see the ways in which these pieces could fit together, but at the time they seemed a distraction from more important applications.  Today, the integration of these and other approaches and dissemination of this information via the internet is a growing possibility and necessity. 

Of course, tying together these visual, geospatial elements means tying together the data behind them, an increasingly complex task given the growing multimedia format of our data, and our collective desires and capabilities to link all aspects of our understanding into a synthesized whole. 

This convergence brings to mind a series of demands, but all can be summed up into a single question:  who is going to do all of this?  New tools and new approaches mean new skills and training.  Are we training our students properly?  To pick on my own discipline (knowing that others have commensurate issues), the graduate school entrance requirements in classics call explicitly or implicitly for years of Latin and Greek, and suggest French and/or German – where does that leave geospatial or other competing applications?  Given that only a few of our students go to graduate school, aren’t we depriving them of potential job-earning skills?  When graduate curricula have changed minimally over the last 20 years, new tenure-track line advertisements are written conservatively, and electronic forms of research and output are handled with potential suspicion by tenure and promotion committees, I see ourselves abrogating much of the critical technological development to other fields such as the geosciences and geography, which seem to have made more adjustments to the digital world.  Maybe we’re good with this.  Maybe not.

In short, I see a need for rethinking what we do as archaeologists/historians, how we train our students, and how we fit into the larger picture of the academy and society as a whole.

Convergence is a time of experiencing other approaches, inventing new ones, and setting new tracks forward.  I look forward to hearing of different viewpoints pro or con.  Maybe I need to stop the coffee and to bed.  Maybe we need to light some torches and grab pitchforks.  I’m good either way.

Confessions of a geospatial anthropological geological statistical computational economic philological classical historical archaeological geek.

I feel it helpful to start the blog off with some introduction and admissions of guilt, with the idea that this will help frame my perspective and questions as I go forth.  Hopefully, readers will see something of themselves in the following.

To begin, I was classically trained in ancient languages and ‘art and archaeology’ as an undergraduate in the early 1990s at a major research institution in the Midwestern US.  I received my MA and PhD in classics with a specialization in preclassical and classical archaeology from another such institution.  I therefore hold the requisite papers to be labeled as a classicist or even a classical archaeologist.  I have been employed by the College of Charleston since receiving my PhD in 2003.  Since 2004, I have engaged in a variety of administrative tasks – first as one who guided the formation of the College’s interdisciplinary archaeology program and served as inaugural director (2005-08), then as chair of the Department of Classics (2008-11).  Concurrently, I served as field director for the Göksu Archaeological Project and Assistant Director for the Avkat Archaeological Project – both in Turkey.  Those who want to see the full run-down can see the cv (admittedly the 2010 version).

Because of my training and career trajectory, I feel oftentimes schizophrenic.  If one tries to assign me a label (as an archaeologist or classicist, for example), my first inclination will be to squirm – hence the title of the post.  I will put on a hat if necessary, but only temporarily.  By and large I have found labels to do more harm than good.  My training on paper shows a normative training in classics and classical archaeology, but the research and employment shows bends into other directions.  Engaged in the research (although not as much as I would like), I have been just as involved in the administration and development of academic programs.  Therefore, my interests run from not only how to better visualize the ancient world, but how to present it to the next generation in ways that engage, and how to best train the next generation of scholars to take advantage of the plethora of approaches and perspectives that now lie before them.

My interest in GIS and other geospatial applications came as I was finishing my dissertation.  I saw GIS as an application that needed to be learned, just as I picked up the skills for designing databases, analyzing chipped stone tools, or understanding economic structures in the past.  As time has progressed, however, geospatial applications have become more powerful, easier to use, and at the same time more specialized and complicated at the higher end.

Many of my colleagues come to me and say that GIS is interesting and they see it as an important tool, but they don’t know anything about it.  To be clear – I have no formal training in GIS.  Rather, it has been continuous learning process, where my use of the tool has developed as my research needs and questions about the past have changed and grown.  One doesn’t start by developing an anisotropic least cost pathway.  One starts by going to Google Earth, looking up your address and finding directions to the nearest bar.  The waters are warm, the atmosphere collaborative, and we’re all here to learn.

This group, I see already, consists of people with a wide variety of interests, approaches, and comfort level with the geospatial world.  This is good.  I hope to learn and grow from the engagement, and hearing the perspectives.  My hopes are that the thoughts expressed here will be moved to greater matters of substance to include new avenues of research, methods, dissemination, and pedagogy.

Why this Blog?

This blog is instituted for the following purposes:

• to serve as a place to bring together people interested in geospatial applications in archaeology
• to foster open discussion and comment on topics of interest to the Interest Group
• to serve as a resource for announcements of conferences, symposia, and other events and information of interest to the community
• to assist in communicating the need to integrate geospatial applications within archaeological methodology and the study of the past, broadly defined

Authorial capacity for blog entries is granted to members of the Archaeological Institute of America‘s Geospatial Interest Group. The blog is administered by James Newhard and Tom Elliott.  Others interested in contributing content may submit posts to the administrators for review.

In general, our purpose is to have a healthy, open conversation about topics and ideas of mutual interest.  Most of all, to learn from each other and have fun.