Balance

This week has been good. I’ve finished a report that was starting to feel like a millstone (and at 31,000 words, was longer by a third than my MSc thesis, and more than a third of my PhD), and instead of feeling daunted by all the things that were waiting for ‘after’ I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into something new.

I’ve not been running since I got back from my trip to the UK the other weekend. This was for two reasons;  firstly I upset my knees on fieldwork. I don’t think it’s anything major, they were just having a grumble, and I didn’t have a chance to rest them ’till now. Secondly, I’ve spent most of this week floored by some weird bug that never quite turned into the death-flu the initial symptoms portended. It seems to be on it’s way out though, so I am going for a run tomorrow and I’ll see how I go.

In archaeology-related news, my paper got accepted for EAA this year, so I’ll be speaking in a session about geophysical methods for studying later prehistory, as well as co-chairing our round table on methods for investigating rural sites. It’s going to be a busy few days in Pilsen, but has anyone got any sight-seeing tips for someone who’s never been to the Czech Republic before? I’d like to cram some touristy things in while I am there.

On a similar note, I’m off to Vienna for ISAP at the end of the month and can’t wait to catch up with the usual suspects. I’ve never been to Vienna before (or Austria for that matter), so, same question really! What shouldn’t I miss? We have an excursion to Carnuntum that I am quite excited about, but what about in the city itself?

I’ve just realised that all that comes off as a bit of a humblebrag, sorry. I love that my job lets me do all of these things!

This week has been about re-learning balance. About an aspect of the ‘simply do’ motto I’d overlooked, or got a bit wrong. The flipside is: or do not. I had a mini crisis at the end of last week, about all kinds of daft stuff, and my mum and dad reminded me that it’s important to be gentle with yourself. Do, or Do Not. But don’t beat yourself up for the things you don’t do. Don’t get stuck in a spiral of negative feelings and introspection. Sometimes it’s OK to be shallow and just skim along the surface of things. It’s how I got through finishing the report: I stopped agonising over every last bit, because it’ll be read and edited by the project team. I stopped hating that I needed to do it, and found that once I was actually doing it, I enjoyed it. I’ve had the same revelation about running, but apparently it’s an epiphany I need to have many times over. I’m struggling to pick a photo this week. I had fun taking pictures of the May fair in the city centre this weekend, I fitted into my old boots (and still LOVE them), I was outraged at/covetous of pink Darth Vader t-shirts, and my brother rightly mocked me for instagramming filtered screen shots, but I think it has to be my first picture of the week, which was a letter from the ever-lovely BrightMeadow reminding me I have wonderful people in my life, and that they need to remember to be kind to themselves too.

Kindness #project52 week 20

 

So, be excellent to each other, and yourselves! I am continuing this theme by spending a chunk of tomorrow being uncharacteristically girly and doing moisturising-type-things… I may or may not post pictures of the no doubt hilarious state I’ll be in while face packs do their thing….

Three weeks in Calabria…

This is a really quick post to put up my #project52 pictures before I run off to Italy again tomorrow, this time for a short holiday with my beloved, who has never been before. I am almost unreasonably excited about showing him around Rome for the first time and watching him have all of these amazing ‘firsts’… On the MUST DO list: The Pantheon, The Forum, The Crypto Balba Museum, Castel San Angelo and Gelato from San Crispinos… have you got any quirky/unusual suggestions to add to our list?

As you know, I went to Calabria for fieldwork. The weather was better than we were hoping, we got all of the work done, but one of my bits of kit died fairly early on in the trip, and we didn’t find a lot of archaeological anomalies. The landscape, the company and wonderful local friends more than made up for any minor frustrations though. We ate agnello, went caving, climbed precipitous things and did a survey at 1400m at an amazing place called Trizzone della Scala. There are a LOT of (mostly unedited and undescribed so far) pictures on my Flickr account, but here are my three picks for #project52….

Wieke on Trizzone della Scala #project52 week 13

Week 13 is my colleague Wieke portering my FM onto Trizzone della Scala… I love this photo because it gives you some idea of the height we were at, and of the crazy topography we needed to go over to get there. This is why the FM is on her backpack- there were places where I really needed both hands!

On the way to Grotta della Camastra #project52 week 14

This was the most ‘interesting’ bit of our hike/climb to get to a really cool cave. I needed a lot of help to get past where the lead guy is standing in this picture- at one point I was too scared to try. Fortunately, that ‘lead man’ is our friend, expert speleologist and mountaineer Nino Rocca. He’s amazing, and has at least one mountain goat in his ancestry…

The reason I was quite so nervous is more apparent when you look at the view in the other direction:

View of Francavilla Marrittima and the plain of Sibari from half way up the Serra del Gufo

The last week was a bit more relaxed, with only one trek up a serious hill, and we spent a lot of time at my favourite place, Mandrone Di Maddalena, which is right where the Raganello river forces its way through a geological fault.

Yours truly making notes on a huge rock that forms part of an enclosure at Mandrone #project52 week15

And now I have to run to work to be in time to supply early birthday cakes for my colleagues at morning coffee ^_^

Digital Archaeology?

#project52 week3 Upwards

Upwards

I’m feeling a bit like the above today. Like I need to be up there somewhere and I don’t have a ladder.

I’m going to start this post with a bunch of disclaimers: I’m not an expert in any of the following things: public archaeology, 3D reconstructions, museums or heritage management. Anything I say here is strictly my own thoughts and has nothing to do with any of the places I’ve worked or studied. I might have a lot of this wrong.

I went to an excellent conference this week, in Gent. It was the ’rounding up’ of a very cool project, the RadioPasts project which brought together research institutions and companies from all over Europe and beyond to try to figure out ways to understand complex archaeological sites without destroying them by excavation. I am full of admiration for the overall project and the work that was done within its purview. Some truly excellent things have been accomplished, as the colloquium clearly demonstrated…

.. but it has left me with some worries (though to be fair, the colloquium just brought them into focus- we talked about some of this at CAA last year, and ISAP the year before). First of all, in the realms of just how far we should go with elaborate reconstructions that are based on one source of information; for example, a magnetic survey. Having studied alongside the virtual pasts people during my MSc at Southampton, I am aware of just how careful a balancing act is needed between producing something that looks good, and is palatable to the public and funding bodies, and staying true to the inherent complexities and uncertainties of archaeology.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the work presented at the symposium was done with a high degree of integrity and authenticity, but I know the software tools exist that mean that I (or someone even less trained) could put something together that was visually indistinguishable but totally ‘incorrect’ on the basis of a poorly conducted and over-interpreted geophysical survey. And if I can’t tell the difference, what about the member of the public, or the council funding officer? I worry about this on two levels: firstly, that it is easy to do it badly, and secondly, that projects that aren’t going to produce these spectacular films are going to find it harder and harder to attract funding, either because the project doesn’t feel a reconstruction is needed, or the type of archaeology does not lend itself to this sort of visualisation. How many more gorgeous Roman cities do we really need? What about projects studying medieval farms, or ephemeral sites that don’t make pretty pictures? Surely that research is just as important?

I understand the analytical benefits of making reconstructions- they are an important test-bed for the impossible in our interpretations, but to have these models as the only end-goal? I worry…

I also worry, in a more complicated way, about the truth-value that is being increasingly assigned to digitally captured archaeological information, for example, in terrestrial laser scanning and geophysics. Take the scanning of upstanding archaeology; walls and so forth. Yes, it is true that in the past the plans and sketches and scale drawings made by a trained expert will necessarily contain an interpretation, decisions made about what detail to record, how to describe something. Reading the material as text and translating it. But I think this is part of the inherent value of such drawings: without interpretation then it isn’t archaeology. The raw stones don’t contain any particularly privileged truth. They’re just rocks until we read them. Yes, scanning captures detail quickly and without pre-judgement, and yes, it means that several people can have a look at that wall, even if it is subsequently destroyed, and come to different interpretations. But don’t imbue the digital record with some sort of ‘truthiness’ because it has been captured by high tech wizardry. The same goes for geophysics. We are now able to capture huge swathes of the landscape, seemingly in their entirety, in one continuum of digital data. But I know that each technique has it’s limitations; the visibility of certain anomalies might vary seasonally, or there might be a whole monument or village that is invisible to your chosen technique. I worry that we are moving into a place where the survey is seen as the end product, not the interpretation and the understanding of blank spots and limitations. I worry that we are making the picture so big we’ve forgotten we still don’t really understand the smallest of the details, but have decided not to worry about it, because if you stand back and squint, it looks like a map…..

So, I worry. And I wonder if I will ever feel like I know enough about epistemology and philosophy and truth values and knowledge creation, and physics and chemistry and maths to put this together in a better way. I’m staring at the tower wondering how the hell I am ever supposed to amass enough knowledge and experience to feel like I get to stand at the top and demand answers to my concerns.

I am really hoping that smarter people than me are worrying about this too. Perhaps we can talk about it at UK CAA in February? But lets all be nice to each other, eh? At the end of the day, we’re all wanting the same things: better interpretations of the past, and better ways to protect it and get people to know about it.

(In other news, I had a good week, great weekend last weekend and got a lot of PhD writing done )

Lazio, Finland and an evil cold…

Hello world.

My good mood, that I last blogged about? It stayed! I’m just writing a quick little update now, as I’ve been off on adventures and have spent longer than I meant to uploading the resulting pictures to flickr.

Lazio was seriously warm, seriously hard work, but also really good fun. It was a very productive little bit of fieldwork that gave us some fantastic starting points for much bigger things next year. I am so pleased about the whole thing. The team I worked with couldn’t have been better: a lot of fun, no bad tempers and everyone willing to work really hard to get things not only done, but done to a high standard. We had an excellent graduate from the MSc Archaeological Geophysics programme at Bradford. I would work with him again in a heartbeat, and if all of Chris‘ students match that standard, then I’d be happy to have them along any time I can!

Early morning, Astura

It was also very beautiful, when it wanted to be. It was good, it felt like coming full-circle, as six years ago I worked for Southampton University and the BSR near Roma, and spent (mis-spent?) some weekends in Nettuno! That was my first ever ‘real’ geophysics job, it was when I found out I had the PhD place… it was also about when I started blogging and using flickr more intensively, as I was away for 2 months, and wanted to stay in touch- no facebook then! At least, not unless you were at a US University. It staggers me how much has changed, in my life, and in the world since then.

I was home in Groningen for exactly 50 hours, then I went to Finland! I went to go to EAA 2012, (a big conference for archaeologists working in Europe). The people I spoke to, the papers I saw and the complex feelings I had about my career and chosen specialism are worth 3 or 4 posts on their own, that I’ll try to get to during this week and next. I met some wonderful people that I knew on twitter, but hadn’t ever managed to meet in person, ate reindeer, drank perry and went on a very good excursion to loads of different archaeological sites. I sent postcards with Moomin stamps, and fell in love with amazing stone artefacts (a bear-mace and a moose-mace) in the museum. Many silly pictures were taken.

Raseborg Castle, Finland

I did take some not-silly ones too- I’m rather pleased with this one, but I wish it was from the other side where you can clearly see the huge chunk of bedrock the castle is built on! I’m feeling positive and inspired by the whole thing, even if at times it was a bit overwhelming and I had my usual ‘please ground, open up and swallow me’ moment after asking some questions in some sessions. Apparently I was very enthusiastic. I’m just going to keep hoping this remains A Good Thing ™ ’cause I am not sure I know how to be anything else. The one session I did manage to be quiet in, John Bintliff wandered up at the end and told me it wasn’t like me to be so quiet! Well!

I got home late Monday night, organised to take the Tuesday off as I knew I was burned out, then promptly succumbed to what will forever be known as ‘the cold from hell’. Those of you arriving here from my twitter posts will already know waaay too much about it as I have been vocal in my whining! I’m just about well enough for work tomorrow, which is good as there is a lot to do before my parents arrive on Friday and I take a week off to spend with them and (later) Matt! Our next fieldwork is exactly a month away, and I’ll be gone a whole month, then straight to the UK for a few days…. thankfully after that it’s just a CAA chapter meeting we are hosting and then nothing too mad until the spring! So, with all that in mind, I am going to sign off for now….. ‘night all x

froglet

Call for Participants: CAA 2012: Roundtable discussion ‘Problems, methods and solutions in archaeological prospection’

At CAA 2012 in Southampton, from 26^th – 29^th March, I will be hosting a session (supported by ISAP) that, at its heart, aims to bring together people for different ‘prospection’ sub-communities in archaeology: geophysics, satellite remote sensing and aerial methods. I would ideally like to have representatives from geospatial and visualisation specialisms as well.

The main conference website is here: http://www.caa2012.org

And the call for papers here: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/caa2012/submissions/CAA2012_proposed_sessions.pdf

This session was thought up at the ISAP conference in Izmir back in September where we decided it would be good to get together with some of the other communities that face similar challenges to us and talk about solutions and the potential for co-operation.

Since then, there has been an extended discussion on the ISAP list about the archive and dissemination of geophysical data, which certainly crosses over into the themes for the session, and in particular my enthusiasm for the open methods store the AARG are working on. Whilst this is certainly a useful topic for discussion during the session I am hoping we can be rather more wide-ranging that this- I don’t want it to be the only thing we manage to talk about!

With this in mind, if you would like to participate, please email me at ‘nameofthisblog’ @ gmail dot com. I’ll want  a short biography and a quick description of what you currently work on, and what you’d like to get out of the session. That way I can have a look in advance for common themes and try to give the discussion some structure.

The sort of outputs I would like to see are:

• Collaborations between geophysics groups and other groups
• Ideas for workshops and conferences, again bringing different sub-disciplines together
• Guidelines (or agreements to start working on them) for the sorts of issues discussed on the ISAP list
• Formalising some of the recent ideas on the ISAP list and deciding how to move forward

At present, I am not sure if participants in the session will need to submit something via the CAA website. As no-one is formally ‘presenting’ I am guessing not, but you will need to ensure you register for the conference when booking opens on December 1^st.  The session is in the Geospatial Technologies track, as session code Geo8.

Thanks for reading, I hope to see you in Southampton,

Kayt

As a short postscript, I’d particularly welcome the participation of folks from: the LBI, the DART project, The Landscape Research Centre, the APRG at Mainz, the AARG, CIDOC people, visualisation/reconstruction people, the GEOSIG of the IFA and the MAPSIG of CAA, but the more the merrier! If you think your perspective is relevant and I haven’t mentioned you then it’s all the more important that you come along!

A copy of the session abstract can be seen by clicking here.