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Archaeogeomancy are pleased to be entering the third month of offering a range of digital heritage and geomatics services.

Focussing on consultancy and building on over a decade of experience and expertise, services now available are aimed at highly specialist digital heritage and archaeological geomatics requirements, skills which even the largest and best resourced of heritage and environmental service providers may not retain in house.

Since opening for business in March 2013, we already have the following projects confirmed and in the pipeline or delivered successfully:

• GIS training course to support archaeologists working on Desk Based Assessments (DBAs) for staff from a major archaeological unit
• Interpretation, reporting and auditing software for marine geophysics developed for a maritime archaeology team
• Interpretation, reporting and auditing software for Desk Based Assessments developed for a major archaeological unit
• A custom ArcGIS toolbar and toolbox containing specialist tools for archaeological use developed for a major archaeological unit
• Consultancy on the production of archaeological Linked Data for a national heritage organisation
• Lecturing at one of the Russell Group universities

More information can be found in the new Services section of the website; contact us to discuss your requirements.

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Herodotus

The Hestia2 project is described as “a public engagement project that aims to cross boundaries between the academic, commercial and educational sectors“.

As part of this, a free one-day seminar is taking place on 18th July organised by Elton Barker, Stefan Bouzarovski, Leif Isaksen and Tom Brughmans and in collaboration with The Connected Past.

The call for papers is as follows:

A free one-day seminar on spatial network analysis in archaeology, history, classics, teaching and commercial archaeology.

Spatial relationships are everywhere in our sources about the past: from the ancient roads that  connect cities, or ancient authors mentioning political alliances between places, to the stratigraphic contexts archaeologists deal with in their fieldwork. However, as datasets about the past become increasingly large, these spatial networks become ever more difficult to disentangle. Network techniques allow us to address such spatial relationships explicitly and directly through network visualisation and analysis. This seminar aims to explore the potential of such innovative techniques for research, public engagement and commercial purposes.

The seminar is part of Hestia2, a public engagement project aimed at introducing a series of conceptual and practical innovations to the spatial reading and visualisation of texts. Following on from the AHRC-funded “Network, Relation, Flow: Imaginations of Space in Herodotus’s Histories” (the Hestia project), Hestia2 represents a deliberate shift from experimenting with geospatial analysis of a single text to making Hestia’s outcomes available to new audiences and widely applicable to other texts through a seminar series, online platform, blog and learning materials with the purpose of fostering knowledge exchange between researchers and non-academics, and generating public interest and engagement in this field.

For this first Hestia2 workshop we welcome contributions addressing any of (but not restricted to) the following themes:

• Spatial network analysis techniques
• Spatial networks in archaeology, history and classics
• Techniques for the discovery and analysis of networks from textual sources
• Exploring spatial relationships in classical and archaeological sources
• The use of network visualisations and linked datasets for archaeologists active in the commercial sector and teachers
• Applications of network analysis in archaeology, history and classics

See the calendar entry for details of the venue and how to submit abstracts of up to 250 words.

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Foggy November English landscape – animals graze with trees and hedges, historic features of the English landscape, overlooked by those modern icons, the National Grid power lines

The symposium

The second symposium organised by the EngLaID project will be held on Wednesday 12th June at Keble College Oxford. The call for paper for this symposium is open till May 3rd with abstracts to be sent Dr Laura Morley.

The call is as follows:

In recent archaeological thinking, it is widely accepted that objects and artefacts are invested with agency, but this understanding is not commonly extended to landscapes; rather any notion of ‘agency of landscape’ is often regarded as synonymous with environmental determinism. This symposium seeks to redress the balance and investigate how landscape can be invested with agency without being environmentally deterministic.

While this one-day symposium is organised in the context of the English Landscapes and  Identities (EngLaId) project, which investigates the development of English landscapes from the middle of the Bronze Age, when the first extensive field systems were laid out, to the Domesday period, when the foundations of the modern agricultural landscape were in place, contributions are encouraged from any archaeological, geographical or other relevant disciplinary perspectives. We also welcome contributions that consider different
parts of the world and different time periods.

Abstracts for 20 min papers and poster presentations are invited that address this tension between cultural choices and the structuring influence of the landscape itself.

The project

The EngLaID (English Landscape and Identities) project is a highly ambitious project being run by the University of Oxford. It is indeed the first time anyone has attempted anything like this (collating all the disparate data for the country) and whilst such an approach has its limitations, being a snapshot in time and all, the research potential for the compiled data is enormous. I am keeping an eye on it for developments in the Linked Data arena in particular.

It is described thus on the project website:

The EngLaId (‘English Landscape and Identities’) project analyses change and continuity in the English landscape from the middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC) to the Domesday survey (c. 1086 AD). Funded by the European Research Council (ERC) at the University Oxford, the project started in October 2011 and will continue for 5 years. Working in close partnership with English Heritage (EH), the British Museum (BM), the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), Historic Environment Records (HERs) and the Archaeological Data Service (ADS), the project combines a mass of existing artefactual and mapping data from – amongst others – EH’s National
 Mapping Programme (NMP), the PAS, the ADS and county HERs (Historic Environment Records).  This is the first time that landscape and archaeological features, together with finds, will be analysed on such a comprehensive scale over such an extended time period. It provides an excellent opportunity to understand the development of the English landscape and the identities of the people who inhabited it over a long-term perspective.

Archaeological Data

An observation in a recent blog post sums up one of the key issues with the way in which the archaeological record in the UK is managed, mirroring my own experience on massive projects of a similar nature such as Rapid Coastal Zone Assessments (RCZAS). When discussing trend surfaces produced from the source data, the observation is made by Chris Green that:

The second (possibly more dominant?) is the variation in recording methods used across the country.  Even where the same software is used, different HERs catalogue their data somewhat differently: some like to split everything up into individual periods and types, others like to collate into multi-period sites; some cast their nets wide to include as much data as possible (e.g. PAS data, MORPH data), others like to only include sites of certain and clear provenance.  This means that the density of data across the country is as much about modern practice as it is about activity in the ancient past.

Unfortunately, this is most definitely true and I would argue this is indeed the primary source of variation in the data. And that is before thorny issues such as recording negative evidence or time based exclusions (some HERs cease to record anything past a certain date). The many and varied ways in which archaeological records have been historically and continue to be created and managed results in highly complex datasets where even basic questions asked of the data are influenced by considerable recording bias. Even basics such as how many sites/monuments are fraught as fundamentally, there are multiple interpretations of what comprises a ‘site’ or a ‘monument’ compounded by different recording practices. This is where some of the geosemantic tools I and others are working on offer potential above and beyond more traditional representations of heritage data but we still some way off from having an infrastructure capable of delivering comprehensive Linked Datasets suitably representative of our combined archaeological knowledge. But we are certainly heading in the right direction and the results from EngLaID should be revealing to say the least.

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Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS)

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) are organising a workshop to look at the preservation of laser scan data.

The event is described thus:

The Digital Preservation Coalition and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland invite you to join them at a workshop to explore the preservation of 3d laser scan data.

Current best practice guidance for the long term preservation of 3D laser scan data, in particular the required metadata is found to be onerous by data creators. This workshop will bring together leading practitioners from the archaeological community, alongside leading data archivists and software suppliers in the UK and Ireland to work towards agreeing a new metadata standard to facilitate preservation.

This event will allow for communication between archivists, creators and purveyors of software and hardware for laser scanning, as well as equipment manufacturers.  The aim is to ensure that the export of metadata is much simpler and more convenient for users.

3D Laser Scanning for Heritage

See the RCAHMS website for more information.

This is a timely event as the rise of laser scanning has produced significant amounts of big data over the past decade. Previous work on this topic, such as the Heritage3D project which I participated in, paved the way whilst the English Heritage guidance on terrestrial laser scanning and the Archaeology Data Service Guide to Good Practice (G2GP) provide practical advice on capturing and managing TLS data but the thorny issue of archive deposition requires further attention. Whilst laser scanning is often the most efficient and practical means of capturing data (importantly re-usable data which can often be repurposed without recourse to further fieldwork), the process of documenting this data and preparing an archive to meet the published specifications is a considerable piece of work. The production of metadata is indeed an onerous task, as stated by the event organisers and any such activity to improve this area of the standards will be welcome.

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS)

A bigger issue, however, remains what to do with the reams of data being produced by contractors. Whilst working for Wessex Archaeology, I designed and managed numerous laser scan projects, each of which produced many tens of gigabytes of raw data, processed data and output drawings, renders and animations. All of this was captured according to best practice guidelines but the point cloud data (raw and processed) itself has not currently been deposited with any archive repositories as a) traditional archives do not know how to handle such large digital datasets and b) cost of archiving with a recognised digital repository is prohibitive to the extent that if this were factored in to the project costs, the project would become unfeasibly expensive. Clearly there is an issue here and with luck, this will be one of the issues discussed at the workshop given the range of people who will be present. Sadly I will not be one of them as I had to turn down my invitation.

UPDATE: the event is now fully booked!

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Sandsfoot Castle

This interdisciplinary conference is to be held later this year in Germany. With a broad range of subjects to be included, this promises to make a very useful contribution to the discourse relating to archaeological geomatics and related subject areas.

The invitation to attend states:

Having its major focus on New Technologies for Interdisciplinary Human-Environmental Research, the symposium aims at bringing together researchers from different disciplines, who deal with the investigation of human-environmental interactions.

We would like to cordially inivite you to attend our meeting and to enter into a cross-disciplinary dialogue between scientists from various subjects like Archaeology, Computer Sciences, Geography, Geoinformatics, History, etc. Besides stimulation of collaboration, common fields of work are to be identified and discussed from different scientific perspectives in order to better understand past relationships between man and environment and to protect cultural heritage.

Digital Geoarchaeology 2013 is affiliated with the Geographical Institue of Heidelberg University and the Insitute of Geography of University of Cologne. It is funded by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

More information is available from the conference website and in the Archaeogeomancy calendar.

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Semantic Web Rubik’s Cube by dullhunk

Into the second month of the PhD now and things are starting to coalesce and take shape. A framework for development, testing and deployment of proposed demonstrators is emerging and I’m making good headway demystifying the world of geosemantics (at least, it’s becoming clearer in my head!).

So, as well as continuing with the literature review, I’m knitting together a whole bunch of tools:

• Java Development Kit (JDK) – the programming language at the heart of it all
• Maven - a project management and comprehension tool
• Eclipse - open development platform
• Jena – a Java framework for building Semantic Web applications
• Oracle 11g - relational Database Management System (RDBMS) with Spatial and Semantic components
• AllegroGraph - a graph database
• Prolog - logic programming
• Protégé - ontology editor and knowledge-base framework
• GeoSPARQL – query language for geospatial data stored as RDF
• ArcGIS - Geographic Information System for data preparation, processing, etc
• GeoServer – open source GIS server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data.

I’ll be posting more along the journey. Next steps will be to complete the literature review, submit stage reports and use some real archaeological data. Exciting stuff!

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Grave monuments

For the circulation of information, queries and general discussion of issues relating to archaeology in the United Kingdom. This list will be used by the Council for British Archaeology information service to announce relevant items of news or information.

Recently, however, it’s, well, gone off the boil. Too many trolls, flames, too much ranting and not enough interesting content or discussion. That is not to criticise contributors, just to observe the list ain’t what it used to be. Some of the long serving members are still there, still doing their bit and I would like to thank them for their long service, much appreciated it is. But I am speaking in general here, no names, no pack drill. Just some late night thoughts being aired.

So, having been thoroughly wound up by the latest thread, and not feeling the urge to mail the list any kind of meaningful response (the whole ritual vs functional debate being somewhat aged, well researched, and quite frankly done to death), I simply tweeted:

Remind me again, why do I subscribe to Britarch…? Posts extolling pure functionalism look to have been time-warped in from times gone by..

— pauljcripps (@pauljcripps) April 16, 2013

Which prompted a bit of a flurry of responses. So in order to take this a bit further than 140 characters will allow, I thought I’d start this post. Give the topic a bit of air. What is going on here? Is the format the problem? Are we now all social media luvvies who simply don’t use mailing lists much? Are we just all a bit stressed and take it out on poor students asking questions of us? I, for my two-penneth, love the old BRITARCH and would dearly like to see something analogous leap from the ashes of the mailing list. Or am I just looking at things with rose tinted glasses…?

And in short, re the whole ‘ritual’ thing, just in case that crops up in the comments: Yes, the term is sometimes abused. No, not everything can be described purely in terms of ‘functional’ ‘causality’. So there. For more information, please go and read something (I would start with the excellent Brück, 1999) and please don’t bring it up here. Thankyou.

The story so far:

BRITARCH

A discussion on Twitter about the mailing list

Storified by pauljcripps· Tue, Apr 16 2013 15:41:29

@lornarichardson Sad but true I agree. I’ll hold out a bit longer though, been subscribed since time began, can always ignore bs pauljcripps

@squeejay @lornarichardson Yes, fewer ‘people what know stuff happy to help’ and more ‘ignorant, rant, blah, blah…’ pauljcripps

@lornarichardson @pauljcripps Yes it is good for that but I feel like announcements sometimes get lost in the rants Emma O’Riordan

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Archaeology in action

Archaeology as a profession is a tough place to work, with pay and conditions well below standard. The feeling that archaeologists do their job as a vocation and are not interested in the money is, in some ways, a sound point; I don’t know any archaeologists who entered the profession to make a fortune but I know plenty, myself included, who anticipated things like career progression, pay rises and earning enough to live on, perhaps even settle down, buy a house and start a family.

The IfA recently made an interesting decision to scrap the requirement for registered organisations to meet specified minimum salaries. At the time, I thought this was a horrendous decision being driven by commercial units in an attempt to cut costs further and stay in business. The IfA have now announced their follow up to this, which will take the form of an open meeting with contributions from IfA Council, FAME and Prospect. So here is a chance to get involved in the process through an open meeting to be held after the conference.

The IfA are advertising it as follows:

IfA is hosting an open forum to discuss the improvement of pay and conditions across the archaeological profession. In January, IfA Council made the decision to remove the absolute requirement for Registered Organisations to meet IfA salary minima. This decision was made alongside strong confirmation of IfA’s commitment to the improvement of pay and conditions, reiterated by a unanimous vote by Council to increase salary minima by 3.1%. While recognising the need to support both employees and employers increasing pay, Council made the decision to take a different tack: in order to have a sustainable impact, the profession needs to find a workable solution together.

Representatives from FAME and Prospect will be joining members of IfA Council in an open discussion. All three organisations have indicated that they believe that remuneration across the sector is not commensurate with skills or responsibilities; and all three will present their current policy on how they intend to address the issue. Each will answer three questions

1. what is your current remit?
2. what can you organisation do?
3. what will your organisation do in the next 12 months?

This meeting provides an opportunity for all practitioners to question the policies presented, and present their own ideas on how the profession – as a whole – can move this issue forward.

The meeting takes place on Friday 19 April at 15:30 at the Lakeside Conference Centre, University of Aston, Birmingham, B4 7ET. The forum takes place after the close of IfA conference, and is open to anyone wishing to attend free of charge. The discussion encourages the widest participation possible, and if you can’t get to Birmingham, there will be other ways of putting your views forward on the day.

Please register your intent to come to the meeting by emailing admin@archaeologists.net, so we can keep an eye on numbers. You do not have to be registered to come to the IfA conference to attend this meeting, and it is free of charge. There are limited spaces, so if you want to come along please let us know as soon as possible.

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So long and thanks for all the fish…

After over five years as the Geomatics Manager for Wessex Archaeology, I have now left to start a PhD in computer science, investigating geosemantic tools for archaeological research (G-STAR) based in the Hypermedia Research Unit at the University of Glamorgan with input from the Geographical Information Systems Research Unit.

Goodbye Wessex…

I am sad to be leaving Wessex Archaeology. Whilst working there, I formed and led the Geomatics team, starting with just myself and one Survey Officer and growing the team to eventually comprise two Survey Officers, a GIS Assistant and two Geomatics Officers. From initially acting solely as an internal service provider for specialist survey and GIS techniques, training and equipment, the team moved to providing services externally within a year of inception and very soon were generating,  undertaking and supporting all kinds of interesting GIS and survey related projects. Without any marketing at all beyond the team’s web page, the team generated a fair income; word of mouth and reputation being key. Becoming part of the broader Geoservices team (incorporating geomatics, geophysics and environmental sciences) promises to further promote and develop geomatics at Wessex.

A particular highlight was contributing a number of case studies to the latest English Heritage Metric Survey guidelines, reflecting the quality and innovative nature of the work conducted. Working with Tom Goskar on techniques for visualising Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data was another highlight as was developing and implementing the approach for the visual impact assessment used in the Stonehenge Environmental Improvements (SEIP) projects.

Hello Glamorgan…

Moving to the University of Glamorgan was an irresistible opportunity however, one which could not be missed. Having invested so much in the Geomatics Team at Wessex Archaeology, I was sad to leave but I will be maintaining my links there through various contracts and work on the SENESCHAL project.

G-STAR builds on the STAR and STELLAR projects, both of which made use of the CRM-EH extensions to the CIDOC CRM. What seems like an age ago, I worked on CRM-EH first as a project member of the English Heritage ‘Revelation Project’ then Principal Investigator on the subsequent ‘Ontological Modelling’ project which developed the CRM-EH extensions (see Cripps et al, 2004; Cripps & May, 2010). The G-STAR project is described thus:

This PhD research project will investigate the integration of spatial and semantic information in the archaeology domain. This research combines two distinctive research areas at Glamorgan: the Hypermedia Research Unit and the GIS Research Centre. The supervisory team includes Douglas Tudhope, Director of Studies, and Mark Ware.

This work will build on the previous AHRC funded STAR and STELLAR projects at Glamorgan, which made significant advances in semantic tools and techniques but where spatial data were out of scope. The spatial aspect is considered one of the key areas for future work. It is anticipated that the research will involve collaboration with outside organisations, including (amongst others) English Heritage (EH), the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) at the University of York, Ordnance Survey (OS).

The research team has been active in the application of semantic technologies to digital archaeology research. This involves mapping and extracting excavation data to ontologies, such as the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and Knowledge Organization Systems, such as thesauri and glossaries for Monument and Find types. However the integration of the spatial and semantic dimensions has proved problematic. Spatial coordinate data does not immediately lend itself to expression in RDF or OWL and it is not clear how to integrate GIS and semantic systems.

Recently work has begun to address this problem, including proposed extensions to the semantic web language SPARQL and spatial extensions to ontologies such as the CIDOC CRM. Various standards based approaches have been proposed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, including the OGC candidate standard semantic language GeoSPARQL. Efforts are underway to consider the appropriate spatial extension to the CIDOC CRM ontology and in particular a GeoSPARQL extension. The PhD work will seek to investigate approaches for modelling the integration of spatial and semantic archaeological data, extending the CIDOC CRM to take account of spatial data and investigating the potential of GeoSPARQL and other approaches.

This research will be looking at a range of geospatial heritage data at different scales and in this first year, I will be completing a review of relevant literature and building some demonstrator systems for review to pave the way for the remainder of the project.

The project is funded through a scholarship provided by the University of Glamorgan and I will be supplementing this through the provision of commercial digital heritage services.

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Spatial Humanities at Lancaster

Following on from their previous event, the good folks at Lancaster University are running another seminar in April.

Such opportunities are few and far between and GIS training can be costly so I would thoroughly recommend taking advantage of this if at all possible.

The advertisement states:

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly used by historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, classicists and others, however adoption of the technology has been hampered by a lack of understanding of what GIS is and what it has to offer to these disciplines. This free workshop, sponsored by the ERC’s Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places project and hosted by Lancaster University, provides an introduction to the use of GIS software aimed specifically at researchers from the humanities and arts.

Outline syllabus:

In an intensive two days we will introduce the basics of GIS software from a humanities perspective.  The course assumes no prior knowledge of GIS software but a basic competence in computing is needed. We will provide hands-on training in ArcGIS, the most widely used commercial GIS software package. Other software will also be discussed. The course will cover: how GIS software represents geographically features; the basics of GIS functionality; using GIS to produce high-quality maps; using GIS as a database; getting point data into GIS; and exporting data to Google Earth.

Who should come?

This event will provide a short but intensive introduction to GIS software. It will be relevant to post-graduate students and early career academics who can subsequently develop these skills in their own research.  It will also be suitable for more senior academics, grant-holders and managers who want a brief introduction to GIS software to allow them to manage GIS projects.  Over the summer we will be hosting a four-day summer school (15-18^th July 2013) which will allow us to explore topics in more depth and to which participants can bring their own data, we do not recommend attending both events as there will be significant overlap.  The workshop builds on a one-day seminar held in Lancaster in November 2012.  People who participated in this are encouraged to attend although attendance at this or similar events is not a requirement.

How much will it cost?

The workshop is free and includes lunch and refreshments, all other costs must be borne by the participants.  Accommodation on Lancaster University’s campus includes: Guest rooms () from £35 per night or the Lancaster House Hotel from £87 per night. Please do not book accommodation until your place on workshop has been confirmed.

How do I apply?

Places are limited, as part of registering please include a brief description (max 200 words) of your research interests and what you want to gain from the workshop. The deadline for applications is Friday 1^st of March.

Please email a booking form to: I.Gregory@lancaster.ac.uk.

For more details of this and subsequent events see: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/spatialhum or contact Ian Gregory at the above email address.

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