Past Thinking

The Antikythera Mechanism is thought to be a 2nd/1st century BC mechanical device for calculating astronomical positions (and thus a very advanced navigational device of its time). It was made somewhere in the Greek-speaking world. Tom Malzbender, one of the inventors of Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM), recently gave a Google Tech Talk entitled “Imaging the [...]

After a year in development, the new Portable Antiquities Scheme website and database is now live. The Scheme’s database holds over 500,000 records and about 250,000 photos. These records are contributed by staff, volunteers and the general public. The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the [...]

This month sees the publication of an article written by myself and Dr Graeme Earl from the University of Southampton’s Archaeological Computing Research Group entitled “Polynomial Texture Mapping for Archaeologists” in the March/April edition of British Archaeology magazine. Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) is a technique that uses ordinary digital photography equipment alongside directional lighting. It [...]

Alun Salt and I have been working on a new website to help simplify the process of finding archaeology and heritage-related photos that have a Creative Commons license attached to them. Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix! The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation [...]

Formerly “National Archaeology Week”, the newly named “Festival of British Archaeology 2009″ will take place between Saturday 18th July and Sunday 2nd August at venues and sites across the UK. The Festival of British Archaeology (formerly National Archaeology Week) is your unique chance to discover and explore the archaeological heritage of the United Kingdom. During [...]

Lasers and Light from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo. This is an animation that I put together at Wessex Archaeology for the Society of Antiquaries‘ Making History exhibition at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. I posted some more information about the animation over at the Wessex Archaeology Computing Blog, so I won’t repeat myself here!

Back in April, I blogged about a new article on archaeological computing written by myself and two colleagues. It is entitled “Making People Believe” and appeared in the 100th edition of the Council for British Archaeology‘s British Archaeology magazine. I am happy to announce that the full text of Making People Believe is now online [...]

Framework Archaeology (a joint venture between Wessex Archaeology and Oxford Archaeology) have just released data from the excavations at Stansted Airport from between 1999 and 2004. The data is released under an Attribution Non-Commercial Creative Commons license. This is good news for archaeologists and other interested parties to be able to reuse and share the [...]

The 100th edition of British Archaeology magazine contains a feature article co-written by myself, Leif Isaksen, and Paul Cripps. I am lucky (or unlucky?!) to grace the front cover (that’s me, bottom left next to the giant flint). The article, entitled “Making People Believe” is about the state of archaeological computing today, where it has [...]

David Connolly and Maggie Struckmeier of British Archaeological Jobs Resource (BAJR) fame, also run a website called Past Horizons. It highlights opportunities for amateur or professional archaeologists to participate in projects around the globe. It’s a great website, with project listings, forums for those who want to talk to others about their experiences abroad, a [...]