By sourcing images and applying the principles of photogrammetry and distributed computing, the results are very impressive. They aren’t going to rival laser scanners just yet, but the animations on the Building Rome in a Day project website are impressive, and show the huge potential of this approach.

Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million photographs. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.

This particular project aims to create “sparse point clouds” to give a 3D overview of the layout of a city, and has interesting potential for interacting with and exploring a place virtually. They are running a parallel project investigating dense point clouds which looks promising, but probably won’t see any popular use for a long time due to the massive amount of processing and data storage involved (dense 3D point clouds and meshes are huge datasets).

The University of Washington project is similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth project. But the difference is that with Photosynth, users have to manually create “synths” by uploading photos of a particular place. Photosynth does not allow users to tap into the millions of other images out there, which moves me to my next point.

What about the copyright implications of crowd-sourced photos? Even if just using Creative Commons licensed images, imagine what the “attribution” page would look like if hundreds of thousands of images have been used from potentially tens of thousands of photographers. I’ll be interested to see how they deal with that side of things.

But overall, this is an exciting development. There is huge potential for cultural heritage applications, especially in the areas of survey and interpretation. I will be following this project very closely.

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!

Sketchup introduced a tool to export models straight into Google Earth, and the rest is history. The company was bought by Google, who now offer a free version of the software, which is limited in what you can import or export. You will still need the ‘pro’ version if you want to use the software in conjuntion with (i.e. exporting to) CAD or 3D visualisation software.

Archaeologists – it’s very easy indeed to import an AutoCAD DWG into Sketchup (or aerial photos, DEMs or a combination), and have fun trying out different interpretations. You can then export them to Google Earth.

It’s a lot of fun, and dare I say it, rather useful.

Get more info at the Google Sketchup website.

At last year’s Mac Expo in London, I was wearing a name badge which contained the name of my employers (hint: it contains the word “Archaeology”), giving the game away about what I do for a living.

A man came up to me whilst I was browsing a stand, and he asked if he could shake my hand. In apprehensive disbelief, I shook his hand. I think my reaction was simple: “Err, of course. Why?”, whilst looking rather puzzled. He replied that he’s watched archaeology on TV and read books about it for years, and always wanted to meet a real archaeologist. We chatted for a bit, and he was doubly amazed that I was an archaeologist who specialised in compter applications. The concept that archaeologists gathered an awful lot of data just hadn’t occurred, and that we might need computers to quantify, query and interpret, and disseminate that information.

Archaeology is pointless if we don’t publish what we find.

I encountered a lot of people at the Expo who asked me about my profession, and all of them were amazed that archaeology uses a lot of modern technology to help us in just about every stage of our work. The same reactions were found at the PodcastconUK conference in September 2005.

A recent discussion with friends about the awareness of technology use in archaeology reminded me of my meetings at Mac Expo and PodcastconUK, so I thought I’d list some of the things we do in the world of archaeological computing. These are basic introductions, a paragraph or two long, as each topic could be a book in its own right.

Before I start, it has nothing to do with digging up old computers (please!). Although occasionally we do have to resurrect legacy systems when mysterious piles of Amstrad 3″ discs appear full of data from the ’80s…

Some of these will seem obvious, others less so:

Databases

Most excavations now use a database to catalogue information about the site. From finds, survey coordinates, context information, to photograph numbers, this type of data often finds itself into a database. This is normally a Microsoft Access database that is sometimes synchronised with MS SQL Server.

Some archaeology units in the UK are centralising their databases to allow for more powerful cross-site queries.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
GIS have been used in archaeology since the 1970s. Digital maps are very important as they allow us to display and query our data spatially, that is, on a map. From simple distribution plans to detailed cost-path analysis (would ancient people have travelled from A to D via B or C?) factored with environmental data.

We can overlay modern and historical maps to help us understand development and change, and the results of archaeological surveys, allowing us to peel back the layers of time. We can even put that data onto Google Earth!

Multimedia

This catch-all term for websites, video, audio and interactive elements is my specialism. Telling the world about archaeology is vitally important, as disseminating knowledge is why archaeology exists. Why dig something up (objects and other features), destroy its context, if nobody else can learn from it?

I currently use traditional HTML websites of mainly static information, along with blogs, podcasts, streaming video and audio, as well as Flash-based “click and drag” games for children. You can see some of my further interests in the rest of this blog.

Social networking tools are, in my opinion, vital for archaeologists (collaboration, sharing, publishing). More on that in future posts.

Systems Development

Contrary to popular belief, some of us archaeologists are programmers too. From basic batch files in C, to fully developed applications for surveying or even site management, we’re programmers too (well, a few of us).

Some archaeology units have their own systems developers (Wessex Archaeology have two), and Oxford ArchDigital is an archaeology unit dedicated to it.

Surveying

We use some pretty advanced gadgets to help us get better accuracy when we survey our sites. RTK GPS, 3D laser scanning (example from Stonehenge), and the usual total stations. AutoCAD is generally used to bring together different parts of a survey, which can then be incorporated into a GIS.

3D Visualisation

Turning thick reports or vague ideas into a visual 3D world is becoming a more popular tool within archaeology itself. From the realm of academia (where it’s been experimented with since the 1970s) to mainstream TV archaeology, like the web, it’s a maturing technology that is getting cheaper for archaeologists to use (in terms of software cost and staff time).

We can create compelling images of the past, but at the same time, we have to remind ourselves that this is a dangerous tool as well. Some of the images that we’re making now, like those in film, are very believable, and it’s easy to believe them as an empirical truth. That’s how the past was when it reality, it’s just one interpretation of many, and could be entirely wrong…

That aside, render farms of multiple computers daisy-chained together for crunching 3D frames are used by archaeologists lucky enough to have them. And making a detailed image or animation makes you really focus on your sources. Many a theory has gone out the window once an image to test it has been created.

It’s a very exciting part of archaeology to work within, as it really is a blend between computers and the past.

Summary

Archaeologists, in general, like to do everything themselves. It’s something of a tradition. I’m as guilty (and proud) of that as the next person. You’ll see what we do is diverse, and often very untraditional uses of technology to achieve our aims.

Each year the Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA) conference is held somewhere in the world, with many countries having their own regional chapters. Here in the UK, CAAUK 2006 is being held at Southampton University (who also teach an MSc degree in archaeological computing).

If you’ve got any questions or comments – please do leave them below. If you’re interested in heritage-related computing, I might be able to point you in the right direction.