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Archives For November 30, 1999
The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) holds its annual meetings this year from January 2 -5, held jointly with the American Philological Association (APA). This year, 3 archaeology students and 3 affilitated faculty will be presenting research, directing colloquia, or chairing sessions, in addition to other professional activities:
Jami Baxley: January 3, 11:00-3:00. AIA Poster Session. ‘The Use of Structured Light Scanning for the Study of the Linear B Deposits from Pylos, Messenia, Greece’ (with Dr. Newhard, B. Rennison, D. Nikassis, and K. Pluta)
Craig Garrison: January 3, 11:00-3:00. AIA Poster Session. ‘A Catalog of Carriage Steps in the Historic District of Charleston: Paving the Way to Understanding the Historic Streetscape of Charleston’
Noelle Zeiner-Carmichael: January 3, 1:30 – 4:30. APA session 24 (Epistolary Fiction and Realities). ‘Master of Letters: Linguistic Competence in Fronto’s Correspondence’
James Newhard: January 4, 12:30 – 2:30. Session Chair. AIA Session 5D (Mapping the Roman World)
Alvaro Ibarra: January 5, 8:30 – 11:30. Colloquium co-Organizer. AIA Session 7E. ‘Composing Unity and Subverting Sovereignty in Iron Age and Roman Dacia’
Jeremy Miller: January 5, 8:30 – 11:30. AIA Session 7E. ‘The Evolution of Roman Encampments in Southern Dacia: An Analysis of Roman Operations and Military Fortifications Along the Upper Olt River Valley’ (with Dr. Ibarra)
Congratulations and good luck over the next few days!
Archaeology
Meet Olivia Adams. She came to the College planning to major in anthropology, then she discovered archaeology her first semester on campus. She didn’t know that it would take her all over the Carolina Lowcountry for field research that year. And she didn’t know that she’d spend a month in France the next summer. It all just jelled.
“I’ve always been interested in anthropology from the socio-cultural perspective, not so much from the physical side. But that first semester, a professor got me to go to a meeting of the South Carolina Archaeological Society, and I was hooked.”
Almost immediately, Olivia got invited to participate in fieldwork at Charles Towne Landing, one of the original European settlements in the Carolinas. “The team working there has a limited budget, so there are lots of opportunities for volunteer researchers.”
She was also asked to assist with research at a plantation site. “We were digging, brushing and sifting in an area thought to have contained slave cabins. That experience really solidified my interest.” Olivia started racking up resume-building experience. Her second semester, she was part of an independent study that used ground penetrating radar to locate kitchen foundations at a site right on campus. And then came the trip to France.
“When my advisor learned that I speak French, she immediately put me in touch with a colleague who runs a dig in southern France. We corresponded and set it up. It was interesting, hands-on work — digging, cataloguing and cleaning specimens from the Upper Paleolithic era. We lived in tents, and the best part was — it didn’t cost me anything. His grant paid for our food, and I was awarded the John Morter Scholarship, which supports student fieldwork.
“That was great experience. I’d never travelled out of the country before; never had to fend for myself. And, it taught me that I’m OK with doing the repetitious tasks that often come with archaeological fieldwork. I learned that even if I have to do that same thing for a month, I still love this field – the cultural and the physical.”
Progam Information
Major in archaeology and you’ll be prepared to work in academia, the corporate world or just about any realm. Yes, you’ll focus on archeological research, but the skills you learn – combined with the knowledge you glean – will make you remarkably versatile. In addition, Charleston is an exceptionally unique setting. It offers opportunities for studies in Native American, colonial, plantation and war-era societies. And the international reach of our faculty extends coursework and research opportunities abroad ranging from Paleolithic France to Medieval Byzantium, from textual analysis to advanced computer modeling.
Facts
- Our program involves faculty from 10 different academic departments.
- You can do valuable fieldwork in your first year, with a choice of various local or regional sites.
- Faculty members are involved in research projects in areas such as Egypt, France, Turkey, Tunisia, Greece and elsewhere.
Opportunities
- Research internships are strongly encouraged and easily arranged.
- The interdisciplinary nature of this field means you could be mapping the sea floor, digging at a plantation site or developing computer models of historic landscapes.
Contact Information
James Newhard
Program Director
843.953.5408
http://gizmodo.com/lasers-drones-and-future-tech-on-the-front-lines-of-a-1447601864
James Newhard is Director of Archaeology at the College of Charleston, where he works to bring 3D imaging, mobile technology and geographic information systems to a field more popularly associated with shovels and dusty brushes. Gizmodo got in touch with Dr. Newhard to learn how he uses emerging tech to dig deep into ancient societies.
What is the biggest challenge in your work that you’ve been able to solve with technology?
I do regional archaeology, or landscape archaeology, which is not so much focused upon a singular site as much as entire regions. We don’t excavate. Rather, we walk through the landscape looking for signs of human activity on the surface.
The fun thing is, all that we find is scatters of pottery that have really been chewed up; they’ve been sitting on the surface for quite a number of years. They’re pretty eroded and very hard to date or even ascribe a function as to what these little, as we call them, “dog biscuits,” were used for. They look like Alpo. What we have is this kind of flattened smear of pottery that has some loose chronological association. We used to basically just throw our hands up, saying, “We can’t really solve that.”
So you needed a way to separate out different artifacts that had been mixed together.
I’d been thinking about multispectral satellite imagery, how they’re splitting up the visible light spectrum into 10, 20, 800 different slices. I have a spectrum, too: time. If I treated the data as a series of layers, like a stacked multispectral satellite image, where every layer is a period of time, then I could start making some calculated guesses in terms of how these various undifferentiated smears of pottery could be associated. And it seems to be working, in a very scary fashion. Scary good. Out of one field, you’ll have maybe 100 artifacts, one of which will be dated to the late Bronze age, two of which will be dated to Roman, one of which will be dated Hellenistic. With the procedures that we’re developing right now, we’re starting to tease out some of that information, and we’re able to see, from a statistical point of view, some interesting patterns emerge.
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Unlayered artifacts. Concentrations of ceramics in blue, with artifacts dated to the late Roman period in gray.
Something you mentioned on your blog is 3D scanning artifacts, particularly Linear B tablets. What’s the benefit of scanning?
Linear B is the earliest form of Greek known to man. This particular set of tablets was found back in the 1930s. They’re very fragile objects, so we can’t really have people falling all over these tablets every single time they want to check out a syllable or a character.
The idea was to use visible light scanning, 3D imaging and RTI—Reflectance Transformation Imaging, which generates enhanced surface renderings—to present them in a way that’s helpful for Linear B scholars but also helpful as an act of preservation. You can very easily zoom in there and see the stylus strokes, and look very clearly as to how they made each character. And, with RTI, we’re able to adjust the lights to various angles, so you can really start teasing out where are the cracks are versus what is an actual, purposeful scratch on the surface.
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RTI image capturing. Several photos are taken with the artifact lit from different angles to create an interactive image.
Video from CulturalHeritageImaging.org showing how an RTI image’s moving light source can help highlight tiny details.
In another blog post you mention drones in archaeology. What’s a good example of how you could use drones?
Drones—oh man, they are hot. In early 2000, I was a grad student working in Albania with a young PhD. We had the inglorious task of mapping the site. We’d start out every morning, and jot down a point every four to five steps to make a high-resolution topographic map. It took us about 12 weeks of field work to put that map together.
Now, you just put a couple sensors on a drone and fly that thing over the site, and you’ve got it in a day. It goes off at a low altitude and snaps everything up; the images are all geo-rectified; bada bing bada boom, there it is.
So no more manual labor for grad students?
Oh, no, somebody has to download those things and stitch it all together! But archaeologists are crazy this way: if there’s a technique, or a tool, or an application—a means of investigation—that will help me understand my question or answer it, I’m going to use it.
Where would you like to see archaeological technology go next?
An area of growth in my mind is virtual landscapes that incorporate our findings into recreated worlds. Typically, we see a lot of 3D visualization that is fairly passive, with fly-throughs or “visits” where you navigate through abandoned, sterile recreations. I’d like to think along a more interactive world, where elements are hyperlinked to more information, the marketplaces are full of avatars, and smoke rises from kitchens. This throws us into the world of gaming technology.
Part of the pull of archaeology is to discover the past, and to recreate in the mind how things would have looked and what types of activities would occur in relation to others. Part of my job is to disseminate my knowledge to a wide variety of constituencies, and digital is the most open way to explore and understand our findings. It’s a medium that is approachable to the widest range of interests.
What’s your fantasy tech for field work?
I’m going to totally geek out here: Jean-Luc Picard, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, was not only Captain of the Enterprise, he was also an archaeologist. Every once in a while, there’d be an episode where he’d go off and do some little investigation thing. He had this really cool tool where he basically just put the artifact on a little platform thing and, boom, it would collect all the information required from that artifact. The measurements, the type of material, the chemical attributes of that object, all the volumetrics—all of that stuff, boom, done. A matter of 10 seconds. That would be awesome.
Would that take away some of the human element of archaeology?
No, because even though you’ve got a crazy contraption that collects all your information, you still have to analyze it. You still have to have a question that is driving the data that you’re using. That human curiosity, that human question of why and how, is always going to be there.
We always strive for better and niftier tools that collect datain a better and more exacting fashion, and for the means of exploration and organization that help us find those associations quicker and easier. But it’s the why that drives us forward.
Images courtesy Dr. James Newhard.
Dig into history at Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site. Discover how archaeologists see beyond written records and learn about past cultures based on artifacts left behind. Visit us for “Piecing Together the Past with Archaeology” for a first hand look at Charles Towne Landing’s archaeological resources. Meet Charles Towne Landing’s archaeologists and tour dig sites where Native American and colonial finds have been unearthed. Some of the hands-on activities you don’t want to miss: a pottery re-fit (an archaeology puzzle), dig boxes and a scavenger hunt. Sign-up for a behind the scenes tour of the archaeology lab to learn more about archaeology beyond the dig. Join us to discover the science of archaeology and the history revealed below the surface.
What to Bring : Water, appropriate clothing for weather
Fee : Park admission is $7.50/adult, $3.50/child, or free with Park Passport Plus
This year’s event will be a day-long program showcasing the park’s unique archaeological discoveries. Visitors will have the chance to handle artifacts, see an active dig site, and learn about the history and archaeology of the village. In addition to the archaeological festivities, a special living history demonstration provided by the Independent Company of South Carolina, Fort Dorchester Garrison will be ongoing throughout the day.
Summerville, SC 29485
Time: 9am – 5pm
http://southcarolinaparks.com/products/10004198
Congratulations to the students and faculty who have had papers, posters, and colloquia accepted for the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America:
Jami Baxley and Dr. James Newhard – “The Use of Structured Light Scanning for the Study of the Linear B Deposits from Pylos, Messenia, Greece” – co-authored with Ben Rennison (Clemson), Dimitri Nakassis (Toronto), and Kevin Pluta (Texas)
Craig Garrison – “A Catalog of Carriage Steps in the Historic District of Charleston: Paving the Way to Understanding the Historic Streetscape of Charleston”
Jeremy Miller and Dr. Alvaro Ibarra – “The Evolution of Roman Encampments in Southern Dacia: An Analysis of Roman Operations and Military Fortifications along the Upper Olt River Valley”
Dr. Alvaro Ibarra – Colloquium entitled “Composing Unity and Subverting Sovereignty in Iron-Age and Roman Dacia”
The Archaeological Institute of America offers a range of funding opportunities, including fellowships, publication grants, scholarships and travel grants—plus the Site Preservation grants and awards, and the new Cotsen Excavation Grants. Attached are flyers listing these, and further information can be found on the AIA’s website at http://www.archaeological.org/grants. We have a November 1st deadline coming up for several of the programs, and we would appreciate it if you could share this information with your colleagues and students.
If you have any questions about the AIA’s funding programs, please do not hesitate to contact me–and thank you for your help in getting the word out!
Best wishes,
Laurel
Laurel Nilsen Sparks
Lecture & Fellowship Coordinator
Archaeological Institute of America
656 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02215
Phone: 617-358-4184
Fax: 617-353-6550
from: http://www.dayofarchaeology.com/the-many-hats-of-directing-an-archaeology-program/
The Many Hats of Directing an Archaeology Program
In my training, I held a focus early on in classical archaeology, earning degrees in classical languages and classical art and archaeology at the University of Missouri, before graduate work in classical and pre-classical archaeology at the University of Cincinnati. Along the way, I also worked as a staff archaeologist at the CRM firm of Gray and Pape, Inc., and held a geoarchaeological fellowship at the Wiener Laboratory at the American School for Classical Studies in Athens.
The diversity of experiences has served me well in understanding the variety of archaeological approaches and methods in play in an active, multidisciplinary program. Charleston, SC is a unique place in terms of archaeological activity, possessing in its environs evidence for Native American, Euro-American contact, colonial, ante-bellum plantation, and post-civil war systems of organization.
College of Charleston students excavating at Hampton Plantation, SC. Photo courtesy of Dr. Barbara Borg
In addition, there are significant sites of military conflict in the area (American Revolution and Civil War). All of these activities and periods of history are found both on land and offshore. Archaeological studies by faculty and other entities are constant in the area, providing local opportunities for student engagement that few other areas of North America can offer. In addition to the local archaeological wealth, the College is home to scholars actively involved in the Mediterranean, Near East, eastern and western Europe, and Egypt.
As in many American universities, archaeology at the College of Charleston is an interdisciplinary program, pulling its coursework, faculty, and students from cognate programs. As Director, my role is to coordinate and communicate the course offerings provided by the constituent programs (Anthropology, Art History, Biology, Chemistry, Classics, Computer Science, Geology, History, Historic Preservation, and Mathematics) to faculty and students, receive and distribute information about internship opportunities and supervise their academic components; build community across the program via social media and events; engage with departmental chairs, program directors, and deans on academic programming to strengthen the program and cognate areas; promote the research and other activities of faculty and students; lead discussions among the program’s Steering Committee in regards to curriculum design and management; advise students; recruit new students; and in general to promote academic and research cooperation across the institution and with relevant local, state, federal, and private entities in the area. In these activities, I am provided with some administrative assistance to facilitate communication with various stakeholders and maintain records useful for tracking the program’s progress and activities.
I still retain my appointment to the Department of Classics, where I teach typically in the areas of introductory Latin and classical archaeology (focused upon Aegean Prehistory and Classical Greece, landscape archaeology, and computer applications in classics and archaeology), and contribute to discussions of curriculum, program development and promotion, and the general academic community.
As a scholar in my own right, I am involved as the Assistant Director for the Avkat Archaeological Project in central Turkey and
Fieldwalking in the Avkat region, central Turkey. Photo: AAP Archives
Peter Bikoulis and Jim Newhard review in-field database systems on the Avkat Project, Turkey. Photo: AAP Archives
the Göksu Archaeological Project in the Taurus Mountains. My interest in survey archaeology has turned my attention to the intersections of survey methodology, geospatial applications, and informatics. I am currently designing the computing data systems for the study of the Linear B deposits from the Palace of Nestor and a number of other informatics and geospatial topics. Currently in the analysis and publication phases for Avkat and Göksu, I am busy with processing these datasets, writing relevant sections of the publications, and managing ‘spinoff’ ideas that are an inevitable by-product of fieldwork.
Fortunately, these various roles tend to not happen all at once. On the appointed ‘Day of Archaeology,’ my day was spent working in one of our GIS labs on campus, where we are developing methods to refine chronological and functional information derived from survey data. Throughout the day, there was the scheduling of several meetings with students, faculty, and administrators for the week ahead; updating members of the archaeology staff on the development of a database to track internship opportunities; forwarding employment opportunities to Classics majors; reviewing abstracts for a professional conference; and communicating with collaborators on the progress of the publication for the Avkat project. In the early afternoon, I briefly met with several students in geospatial informatics about the status of several ongoing research projects and how they may become engaged, and reviewed the efficacy of recently-obtained 3D visualization software.
Newhard, wearing a hat. Photo by permission of author.
As an academic archaeologist with administrative duties, one wears many hats. As I work in the field of archaeology, I find that the skills and knowledge critical to most tasks are not the ones that were the subject of comprehensive and final exams. Archaeology is as much a process of working with people as it is with the artifacts. No day is the same, but in most cases, the day is full with any number of activities that engages the mind, other people, and our combined understanding of the past and its applications to our present condition.
from: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20130720/PC12/130729999
After weed whacking in a ditch full of water, Larry James surveys the property he maintains and proclaims to be the happiest guy in the world.
The land is not just any piece of dirt. James is in charge of what he considers one of the most precious pieces of property in the entire Lowcountry. The 38-year-old is the manager/ranger and resident archaeologist at Colonial Dorchester State Park.
What he loves to do most is discovering what’s underneath the green grass. He only gets to spend about 30 percent of his time doing that, though.
The majority of his days are devoted to interpretive tours, upkeep of the grounds, public outreach and lecturing.
Managing a historic site is a privilege coupled with responsibility. He also knows that anytime you dig a hole, it’s never the same once the dirt is replaced. That’s why he cherishes and protects what he believes is hallowed ground.
Colonial Dorchester and Charles Towne Landing are generally considered to be the richest archaeological sites in all of South Carolina. Not far beneath the surface are pieces of history that tell us about life “… before America was America.”
Self discovery
His grandfather and father were both pioneers in the car business in Charleston. After Larry graduated from the College of Charleston, he tried to appease his dad by pursuing business and sales. Larry loved history, though, not balance sheets and monthly quotas.
In 2005, James returned to the area to be near his father, who was in poor health. He also started to volunteer at the Charleston Museum. It didn’t take long to rekindle that thirst for discovering the unknown and he decided to seek a master’s degree in archaeology at the University of West Florida in Pensacola.
Soon, he would teach at that same school, but something kept pulling him back to his Lowcountry roots.
In 2011, he learned of an opening in archaeology at Colonial Dorchester and after a few years of wondering and wandering, he came home.
Looking for the past
Though everyone knows about Colonial Williamsburg, Va., Colonial Dorchester was actually founded earlier. For 80 years, this trading town along the Ashley River was populated by 800 to 1,000 people.
While Williamsburg has been commercialized and heavily marketed, Dorchester’s landscape remains rustic and largely unchanged. What fascinates James is that there’s still so much unknown about the people and the property because the ground has been undisturbed for 300 years.
He still “feels” something when around the various ruins. The church bell tower remains, though the church was burned by the British. A tabby wall that once protected the powder and munitions is still intact, but there’s a huge crack delivered by an earthquake in 1886.
Archaeology is all about discovering or seeing “the gray”: Often there’s more unknown than known. Sifting through the remains can produce more questions than answers.
This ground is so fertile and its contents so vast. By design, though, barely 20 percent of it has been fully explored. At a recent dig, a 9-by-12-foot hole revealed 4,000 artifacts. There were pieces of ceramic, buttons, glass and coins.
For James, those days when he gets his hands dirty are when the job doesn’t seem like work. But his passion for finding answers is tempered by an understanding that he’s also the property’s caretaker.
The first 100 years of Colonial history are under his feet every day he comes to work. To understand the past, he appreciates a need to protect the present.
He loves to dig and sift in the rich soil that early settlers once found so appealing. There are times, however, he also must grab the business end of a weed whacker to make sure it is as attractive to the eye on the topside as it is to inquiring minds who want to dig a little deeper.
Check it out:
See something missing or want to add more? Let us know!