Keynotes

Program Director, Open Context
Researcher University of California, Berkeley

BIO

Dr. Eric Kansa (PhD, Harvard University) directs Open Context (http://opencontext.org) a data publishing venue for archaeology. His research interests explore web architecture, service design and how these issues relate to the social and professional context of the digital humanities and social sciences. He also researches policy issues relating to intellectual property, including text-mining and cultural property concerns, and actively participates in a number of Open Science, Open Government, cyberinfrastructure, text mining and scholarly user needs initiatives. He has taught and practiced project management and information service design at the UC Berkeley School of Information. He has been a principal investigator and co-investigator on projects funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, Hewlett-Packard, the Sunlight Foundation, Google, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Encyclopedia of Life and the National Science Foundation. Eric recently joined the Board of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications, a granting program that funds archaeological publications.

KEY NOTE PRESENTATION

TITLE: Reimagining Archaeological Publication for the 21st Century

ABSTRACT: Scholarly communications stand at a crossroads. Long-established publication norms face disruption as researchers and their stakeholders shape and adapt to new dissemination models offered by the World Wide Web. Many researchers have seized the opportunity to experiment with ways to openly and collaboratively share a rich and more comprehensive picture of the archaeological past. Reform efforts to promote Open Access and Open Data have made impressive progress in recent years. However, communications in archaeology also face great challenges. Media interests continue to lobby for stronger and more punitive intellectual property laws. Such legislative efforts threaten to undermine much of the progress made by Open Access and Open Data advocates, since they would greatly increase the costs and legal risks in using the published archaeological record. Academic incentive and reward structures, coupled with deeply established notions of prestige, make many of our colleagues apathetic and sometimes overtly hostile toward new and more open forms of scholarship. Worse, many of our discipline’s professional societies, citing sustainability concerns, have joined with large commercial publishers in attempting to block Open Access mandates. Our current struggles in scholarly communications show how change can threaten existing institutional structures, funding models, modes of recognition and career advancement, and relationships between archaeology’s stakeholding communities. In other words, publication has become political. Differing political visions help shape our expectations in issues like financial sustainability, the place of archaeological data in publishing, and which institutions should play a role in communicating and preserving the archaeological record. Recognizing these various and often conflicting interests will make us better equipped to envision a more sustainable and equitable archaeology for the 21st century. Innovations in many areas, including Linked Open Data, Web services, and services for data citation and preservation, have enriched archaeology’s information ecosystem. They also promise to make archaeology’s knowledge contributions more broadly accessible and relevant to other disciplines and public communities. Optimistically, such innovations will take root in a changed landscape that better reflects and encourages the dynamism of our field.

Head Department of Maritime Archaeology
Western Australian Museum, Fremantle, Western Australia

BIO

Dr Jeremy Green started in maritime archaeology in 1967 at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology, University of Oxford, working on projects in the UK and in the Mediterranean. These included the initial survey of the 4th-century BC Kyrenia shipwreck in Cyprus where he pioneered the remote sensing survey of a shipwreck. He continued at the Research Laboratory, directing two seasons of survey for shipwrecks at Cape Andreas, Cyprus and developing technical equipment for underwater archaeology, including an underwater metal detector, a seagoing magnetometer and a sonar position-fixing system for the magnetometer, and photogrammetric techniques. These were all new applications for maritime archaeology and have been subsequently widely used within the field. As Head of the first maritime archaeology department in Australia, and director of the first archaeological excavations of post-historic wreck sites in the world, he set the standard for building a research profile for Australian maritime archaeology that has significantly contributed to Australia’s leading position in maritime archaeology in the world today. He established and was the foundation president of the Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology, a key advocational group, and was appointed director of the Australian National Centre of Excellence for Maritime Archaeology in 1996. He was awarded the Muckelroy Prize, Rhys Jones Medal, Asia-Pacific Maritime Archaeology Award and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Through training programs, workshops and excavations conducted overseas Jeremy Green have been responsible for expanding professional development, training and education in maritime archaeology in places such as Thailand, China, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Kenya.

KEY NOTE PRESENTATION

TITLE: Application of computer techniques in maritime archaeology

ABSTRACT:The development of the computer over the past 40 years has revolutionized a vast range disciplines. This presentation deals with the application of the computer to maritime archaeology and fall into three basic areas: Remote Sensing; Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Site Recording. It is hard to imagine how in the late 1970s the programmable calculator was the best available technique for computing in the field. Likewise, the advent of an affordable digital camera and its ability to interface with the computers that were developing at the same time created further opportunities. Today, the possibilities for the application of computer techniques are at time hard to keep up with. Remote sensing has been a technology that has been widely used in commercial mineral and oil exploration, the application of these techniques to archaeology began in the 1960s when magnetometers and other metal detecting instruments began to be used to detect wreck sites. At the same time the side scan sonar was developed. These systems, together with a range of sub-bottom sonars, multi-beam soar, and sophisticated sonars are widely used in searching for wreck sites, recording underwater landscapes and submerged structures and buildings. Much of this work is incorporated into GIS that enable the display of this information graphically. Thus aerial photographs, can be placed and overlaid with site plans, contours, magnetic surveys and side scan sonar images. All this is presented in a georeferenced plan so that the relationship between underwater sites and topographical features on land can be precisely determined. Site recording is no longer a tedious process of measuring with multiple tape measures, but in good visibility, calibrated cameras can be used to record sites in a fraction of the time it took using conventional techniques. Likewise, in very poor visibility sonar positioning systems can be used to record sites. In the intermediate situation where conditions are unsuitable for photography, programs are available to increase the speed and accuracy of conventional survey. These techniques will be discussed and illustrated with examples of their application.

Director of the Landscape Research Centre, Yedingham, Malton, North Yorkshire, UK
2013 Field Archaeologist in Residence McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge

BIO

Dominic Powlesland is a field archaeologist and internationally recognised pioneer in the application of computing to field archaeology. He has been actively engaged in computing in the field since 1984 both as a user and a software author.
‘He has been deeply committed to archaeology ever since he joined a local excavation in Colchester at the age of 11. By the age of 16, he was engaged on projects in Winchester, and, soon after, in York. After several years at the University of Manchester, he moved back to Yorkshire to undertake a small rescue excavation at West Heslerton in the Vale of Pickering. From these small beginnings, Dominic has gone on to establish himself as one of Britain’s most influential archaeologists.
As Director of the Landscape Research Centre, he has run an extended programme of survey and excavation in the Vale of Pickering at West Heslerton. This programme has revolutionised the understanding of prehistoric to early medieval period settlement patterns and is widely regarded as one of the most important landscape archaeology projects in Europe. Running now for 35 years, the Heslerton project has no parallels anywhere else in Britain and, indeed, the world. From the outset, its aim has been simple and incredibly bold; to take an entire landscape apart. Through the innovative integration of aerial photography, remote sensing and excavation, the project has been tracking the area from prehistory to the present, exploring how people lived and how the pattern of their lives was entangled in broader historical processes. There was no map, no existing model, for a project like this.
What makes Dominic's work all the more remarkable is that it has been as much about the contemporary landscape as the past. For over 30 years, and long before it became fashionable, he has taken great pains to involve local communities, and to bridge the unhelpful gap between commercially funded archaeology and academic research. ‘
Prof. Mark Edmonds DUniv presentation, York, 2011
He holds Visiting or Honorary Professorships in the Universities of Leeds, York, Huddersfield and Vienna and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of York in 2011 on the basis of his contributions to archaeological computing, approaches to excavation and landscape archaeology.

KEY NOTE PRESENTATION

TITLE: My mind Boggles as I Goggle at my Google or 10,000 years beneath the arable landscape of the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, UK.

ABSTRACT: When called to conduct a rescue excavation ahead of sand extraction at a small quarry in Eastern Yorkshire in 1977 I had no idea that I would undertake the hardly funded project (at what on the first visit was one of the bleakest places I had ever been) or that I would still be working at the same site 35 years later.
I certainly had no idea that less than 5 years later a large van would pull up outside the 12th Century house (hovel) that I lived in and deliver the many boxes that made up a Wang 2000 computer with 8K of in box memory. That computer (that like so many since joined the techno-scrapheap in an annoyingly small time) was the instrument that I first learned to program and which triggered the idea that this ‘new’ technology might have something to offer for field archaeology.
During the early years of applied computing in archaeology our work as archaeologists was constrained by the limitations and need to make it ‘fit’ the available technology. However in the last few years this situation has reversed and now we have the freedom to ‘bend the technology to our will’.
In my case that has been the search for the ‘real archaeology’, how much stuff is out there, and when is enough, enough? What do we actually need to know before we can even think of asking or better answering difficult questions, and how do we secure the knowledge infrastructure needed to process the archaeological ‘theory’ that now seemingly ‘dominates’ our much maligned field discipline?
This paper will look not so much at the toys and software but at the process of discovery and delivery of landscape scale data from the individual grave to a whole landscape in 3D and 4D and the urgency with which we must work if it is not all to be a waste of time. Along the way it will reflect on aspects of past current and future research and the role of applied computing to improve and enhance rather than replace the observational and recording and delivery infrastructure which has for so long been the subject of site-hut and bar-room discussion.