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 (without images due to restrictive copyright agreements).
Feel free to discuss the article in a comment below.
By A. Carty (Archaeoptics Ltd) and Thomas A. Goskar (Wessex Archaeology)
[UPDATE] If you would like a PDF of this article, hop on over to Archaeoptics to download a copy.
Abstract
The use of terrestrial 3D laser scanning devices is increasing in all surveying areas including topographic surveys and building recording. However, a dichotomy exists in that the deliverables produced by such surface-rich acquisition devices generally tend to be surface-less clouds of points.
This article discusses the use of a Callidus 3D laser scanner on a multi-phase site at Knowlton, Dorset. This site originally featured a Neolithic henge earthwork (circular bank and ditch) with two causeways crossing the ditch. Later, in mediaeval times, a church was built in the centre of the henge to effectively Christianise the pagan monument.
The purpose of the exercise was to acquire not only a complete dataset of the earthwork for topographical analysis, but also a high-resolution scan of the church fabric itself.
Figure 1: Knowlton Church and Henge. The Callidus 3D laser scanner can be seen to the left edge of the photograph
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This time several years ago, I was stuck in an internet rut. I had a fairly fixed number of websites which I would visit daily, but, through habit, rarely step outside of that loop. I had a personal website, which I first created in 1996, but I rarely had any interest in it from the outside world – it was a personal excercise to learn new technologies. Like my web browsing, it too stagnated. I changed the look of it because I was bored, or keen to try out a new design, but the content rarely grew to more than a list of links. I would certainly never try to write something like this on it – for starters it was unlikely that anyone would find it to read it.
Static sites, stagnant sites
In the year 2000, when I begain my masters degree in archaeological computing (and coupled with a connection to SuperJaNET – the high speed academic network), I began to experiment a little more with web publishing, and found that the projects I was working on were worthy of a mention on the net. I revamped my website yet again, and began to put 3D renders of some work on there, and a few descriptions of what I was up to and some of the techniques I was working on. But I had no traffic. Manual search engine submission didn’t seem to work, links from some friends (equally obscure) websites, didn’t bring many visitors. It made me wonder what the point of it was, especially as I was hand coding everything, and was a considerable time investment.
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Mike 3:09 am on 11 September, 2005 Permalink
It is a pleasure to see such an articulate and thoughtful blog post! Keep up the good work. Given your interest in social software, blogging, and social bookmarking, I thought you might like to check out our new site http://www.blinklist.com. It is not much yet, we have a long way to go, but if you get a chance to take a peak would love to hear your thoughts given your passion and understanding of the space. Happy blogging!
Edie 3:28 am on 23 February, 2006 Permalink
Hi. I just ran across your blog from a comment you left on alun. Then, as with all blogs, I dip into the archives and get off track. Anyway, I just wanted to commend you on your excellent writing and thoughts here. This is very good.
Tom 9:20 am on 23 February, 2006 Permalink
Many thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’m going to do a follow-up soon, as the topic moves on with gathering speed, and I think I’m starting to digest the ‘next wave’ sufficiently to be able to summarise my understanding in prose.