You can download PTMs of all fragments thanks to the HP Labs Antikythera Mechanism website.

Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) is a technique that uses ordinary digital photography equipment alongside directional lighting. It produces images that can be lit from any direction, as if you had the real object in front of you. It is an excellent technique for analysing fine details on surfaces, something that has particular utility in archaeology.

The full text will be available online after the next edition of BA comes out.

The photo above is of the PTM illumination dome which I designed and built at Wessex Archaeology. You can see more details about the dome in my building a PTM illumination dome Flickr set. I have much more to say about PTM, so stay tuned.

Find out more about the Wessex Archaeology PTM rig and see interactive examples.

Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

The clever bit is the search page.

Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

Link: Archaeopix

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 this two-week archaeological extravaganza, which will run from Saturday 18th July to Sunday 2nd August, you can take part in excavation open days, hands-on activities, family fun days, guided tours, exhibitions, lectures, ancient art and craft workshops and much, much more.

The aim of this annual event is to encourage everyone, including young people and their families to visit sites of archaeological/historical interest or museums, heritage and resource centres, to see archaeology in action and to take part in activities on-site.

The Festival is a celebration of both British archaeology and of the presentation of archaeology from around the world in Britain. Events take place annually all over the UK.

The Festival of British Archaeology is the new name for National Archaeology Week (which has been taking place since 2005, as an expansion of National Archaeology Days, which were established in 1990). The Festival retains the general format of National Archaeology Week but gives everyone even more opportunity to participate in a wide range of archaeology related activities and events across the UK, by spreading the events over a fortnight.

More details can be found at the Festival of British Archaeology website.

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!

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.

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 data, and another step forward towards opening up data about our past.

Framework Archaeology also distribute a (Windows-based) free data viewer, which provides basic GIS functionality for viewing the Stansted and Heathrow Terminal 5 data. The installation process is simple – download the Free Viewer (as it is called) and run the installer. Then download the dataset, run the dataset installer, launch the software, and explore away…

For those that just want the raw Stansted data, the formats for download include csv, xml, gml, shp, data dictionary, photos (jpg), and sections (jpg).

The excavation data for Heathrow Terminal 5 was released by Framework Archaeology in a similar way last August.

Making data from such an important archaeological excavation is a great philosophical move, and I do hope that more organisations follow suit. The key will be to see what (if anything) people do with this data…

Let’s hope that other heritage organisations follow suit. The “All Rights Reserved” copyright model is very restrictive when you study and record the past, and want to share some of that work with others to aid and encourage further learning.

By adopting the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0″ license, they are actively saying to people “we want you to use our photos”. Which for a heritage organisation, is fairly novel!

They have moved much of their content over to a Joomla CMS, and employ some other open source projects such as Gallery. We are promised much more innovation as part of their “Open Archaeology” programme.

It looks as if it’s early days yet for their website. Much of the content is still buried too deep, and the URIs are horribly long, but I’m willing to bet that as they get to grips with Joomla (and the many modules that are available for it), that will soon change. I wonder how long it is before they get a blog (I want an RSS feed!)?

The move from oxfordarch.co.uk to thehumanjourney.net is an interesting one, that seems to reflect a change of philosophy at Oxford Archaeology. There will undoubtedly be a huge drop in their search engine rankings, but it probably won’t take long for them to recover their position if they publish content frequently, and get new links to their new content (I’m sure this post will help get them started!).

Speaking as the webmaster for Wessex Archaeology, I ‘m impressed at the step that they have taken. I like the philosophy of being ‘open’, which in general ought to apply to the whole of the archaeological discipline. Unfortunately, when we’re working in the commercial sector, competing with each other for contracts, it’s not always that easy.

So keep your eyes peeled on OA‘s new website, and give them feedback to help them along.

And keep your eyes peeled on the Wessex Archaeology website, as they’ve a few interesting features in beta that are soon to go live for testing.

The PAS blog covers pretty much everything done by the Scheme, from technical notes about the website the the information contained withing the PAS database, to spotlighting particular finds of note. It’s an interesting read for techies and non-techies alike.

At the time of writing, the latest post covers the scheme’s usage of open source software. It’s nice to read something like this from a fellow heritage professional:

It should be recognised that IE sucks by now.

Yes!

I’m reading the post as I write this, I confess, and it’s just mentioned me as a “guru”. Well I never! Moreimportantly, it’s mentioned that the PAS will be implementing geotagging later in the summer, which is heartening, as I’ve been very keen to see this applied to in a heritage context. Well done, guys!

Link: Portable Antiquities Scheme blog