In the news...
Artefact factsheets update
One of Urban Archaeology’s wider aims is to develop
training materials for use on archaeological sites. For several years we
produced an occasional and ad hoc series of hand-outs and reference sheets for use in identifying finds and aiding in the
recording and interpretation of archaeological features and site formation processes.
A couple of years ago Urban Archaeology applied for grant
funding to develop a series of factsheets based on common classes of artefacts;
unfortunately we weren’t successful however we did prepare a pilot version of a
Roman Ceramic Building Material (CBM) Factsheet containing information on types
of CBM found in London. The concept was for a free downloadable A2 poster that could
be displayed in site huts and tea rooms, with smaller A4 versions available as handouts,
or potentially viewed on smart-phones. There's a downloadable version of the pilot factsheet below -the fonts don't view very well on the Scribd website, so its best to download it and it will open as a pdf.
We’d be very interested in any feedback on the format and the
level of content, especially if anyone is interested in sponsoring or helping
develop what we feel would be a great resource for archaeologists!
Iron Age burial and medieval farming
Since August Urban Archaeology has been working for LP Archaeology
excavating the remains of a medieval farm in a pasture field next to The Horse and Groom Inn, Bourton on the Hill in the Cotswolds. The pub is building a new
car park which needs to be terraced into the hillside and which would remove all
the archaeological remains, so we are excavating these before the ground
reduction.
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| Aerial view of the site looking north showing some of the medieval farm buildings |
Trial trenches in 2011 showed that there was a varied range
of remains on the site: a large Iron Age ditch, a Roman pit containing building
rubble and grain-processing waste, medieval pits and postholes, and the remains
of at least one stone-built medieval building. However when we stripped the site
we hadn’t really expected to find an almost complete ground plan of a medieval
farm, with nine rooms -each measuring approximately 5m by 5m- and with some
walls surviving to 1.2m in height.
Construction, demolition and recycling in the Cotswolds
We can tell a lot about the medieval buildings on our site at
Horse and Groom Inn from the physical remains that survive, but there are also
other clues to the appearance of the buildings, some of which can be inferred
from what is not there, rather than
what is.
Bourton on the Hill medieval building: Room F fly-through
We've been using photogrammetry to record parts of our medieval farm site at Bourton on the Hill. This computer-generated animation of the small room featured in our last blog post was produced using photogrammeric techniques.
Photogrammetry is an established archaeological recording technique and uses photographs to create reconstructions of buildings, structures and sites. In traditional photogrammetry fixed 'targets' are used as reference points to 'stitch' the photographs together and 'rectify' them to the correct scale and viewpoint. Increases in computing power have led to computer-based photogrammetric programs that can combine many digital photographs to create 3-D models of the subject without the need for targets. The models can be rectified (scaled and located spatially) so that we can then produce scale 2-D drawings from the 3-D model, these drawings are then used in the post-excavation work and as illustrations in the final published report.A series of small walls....in the Cotswolds
The weather has definitely turned since our Open Day at the
medieval building complex at Horse and Groom Inn Bourton-on-the-Hill, but work has carried on. We’ve
been concentrating on removing the last of the rubble infill of the rooms and
we’re nearly there.
Bourton on the Hill Open Day
Today Urban Archaeology and LP Archaeology held an open day
at our excavations at Bourton on the Hill in the Cotswolds. Despite the weather
early on being rather dreich we had a
steady flow of visitors who viewed the medieval buildings and a selection of
our finds, and could ask questions of the site team. And by the afternoon it
was a beautiful autumnal day.
Medieval building excavation in the Cotswolds
We are still working on the LP Archaeology site at Bourton on
the Hill, next to the Horse and Groom
Inn. The site contains extensive remains of a series of medieval buildings, well preserved beneath layers of rubble. Gradually we are removing those thick layers of rubble collapse from within and around the medieval
buildings. Scorch marks on some walls suggest a possibly catastrophic cause of abandonment, but this may be just from localised burning -it is early days yet and we need to unpick more of the site sequence. It does however seem that the rubble from the abandoned walls may have been sorted through and the best of the
stone taken for reuse elsewhere in the village.
Urban meets rural in the Cotswolds
For the last few weeks Urban Archaeology has been
running a site for L - P : Archaeology ‘somewhere in
Gloucestershire’. The site is quintessentially rural –commanding views across
the Cotswolds, sheep grazing the spoil heap, church bells counting the hours,
but archaeologically it has a decidedly urban feel.
Evaluation in 2011 showed that the
site has Late Iron Age and Roman occupation, however sealing all this is a medieval building sequence that wouldn’t be
out of place in an urban environment. For the past fortnight we have been
removing the layers of soil and limestone rubble that had developed after the
buildings went out of use, we have now defined most of the walls and are now
removing rubble and silt infilling above the floor levels. So far we have over
ten rooms of up to 6m by 6m which are terraced into the hillside and arranged
on two sides of a courtyard. The walls are of local Cotswold Stone and are
nearly a metre thick and they survive up to 1.2m high in places. Burning on
some walls suggest that some of the buildings may have burnt down although
we’ll need to get down to the floors to find out for certain.
After the fieldwork, the hard work: post-excavation
Originally posted at The Day of Archaeology 2013
When I signed up to Day of Archaeology I thought I would be out
on site, I didn’t know where–originally it looked like a big site in London,
but that has been delayed, and then it seemed I’d be up the road on a site I
evaluated a couple of years ago. As the recent heat wave began I became a bit apprehensive
at the idea of digging 3m wide rubble-filled ditches in the baking heat, but
that site slipped
too…
So I am in my office finishing off the report for some
recent fieldwork I did in west Nepal for the Central Himalaya Project. The project
intended (amongst other aims) to record a sample of medieval stone monuments
belonging to the Malla dynasty, evaluate the suitability of recording
techniques including photogrammetry,
and try and develop a database for future assessment and analysis. In total we recorded
58 sites, with 32 temples, assorted other sites and monuments, and over 80
architectural fragments. The fieldwork was hard work –up by 6am, lug all the gear
to site, work through the day with a short break and back at 7pm for data entry
and downloading. But the team was good, the weather was hot, the beer was ice
cold and the scenery and locals were fantastic. It didn’t exactly feel like a ‘jolly’
as all my mates called it, but it was quite nice to be sipping single malt
looking at the stars and glad there wasn’t a CSCS card for thousands of miles.
The downside of any expedition is coming home, and with
archaeology that doesn’t just mean returning to work, but writing up your
results. Fieldwork somehow always seems more ‘fun’ than the grind of
office-based Post-Ex, and there has been plenty of checking and cross-referencing
of records, data-entry, and form-filling to do. The monument gazetteer seemed
endless, the temple terminology impenetrable, and there were seemingly hundreds
of drawings to check, ‘ink up’ in Corel-Draw and work out exactly what each
stone fragment might represent.
In amongst the grind there are moments when it all comes
together, managing to reconstruct a ‘lost’ temple from fragments of stone, the
satisfaction of finding that your thoughts on temple architecture were echoed
by published works, the realisation that common motifs and styles were being
used across hundreds of miles and on a wide variety of monuments of both Hindu
and Buddhist origin.
The Day of Archaeology 2013: In limbo: site slippage and juggling jobs
Posted as part of The Day of Archaeology 2013
I was meant to be working on site today; at less than an hour’s drive up the road it would have made a pleasant change from working several hours’ drive away, but the site start date has slipped. It’s a fairly common occurrence and can happen for any number of reasons, sometimes down to delays in planning permission or due to other construction work, the client’s cash flow, or sometimes just the weather. Sometimes sites go into apparent hibernation and only resurface months or even years down the line, when suddenly you get a call or an email saying that 'the footings are being pulled next week, where are you'!
On this occasion it is due to planning control and not yet having the Written Scheme of Investigation signed off –this is the document that says what we will do on site (and afterwards), and how we will dig and record it, and it has to be approved by the local Planning Archaeologist within the relevant local authority. Ours is still in limbo, so the site can’t start.
Managing the flow of work is never easy, and is part of the reason why site staff contracts are often short, and not extended until the last minute –no-one knows if the work will be there on Monday. When you are a sole trader it gets harder –you either need to be able to clone yourself to deal with a glut of work, or find something to fill the hours when a job slides. It is almost always outside your control, and sometimes there seems to be little that can be done to mitigate the problem.
My freelance work is luckily not restricted to site work –I’m also an illustrator, create training materials, do grant-funded research and I carry out post-excavation and publication work on various archaeological projects. All this work often has slightly less demanding deadlines than the fieldwork -it has to be done, but the deadline is usually 'tomorrow', rather than 'yesterday'. So having a mix of different types of projects gives me the flexibility to be able to deal with last minute delays to sites. Picking up and putting down projects every few days isn’t the most efficient way of working, but sometimes you have to do it: its a juggling act.
Day to day the juggling of current jobs is usually ok, and you do get the occasional day off to counterbalance the runs of 18 hour days required to meet deadlines. The bigger impact of slippage is in tendering for future work as it may take a month or longer for sites or PX programmes to go live, and all the time all your jobs are slipping, being brought forward, and morphing from one day watching briefs into three week excavations. The Year Planner starts to look like 4-D Tetris, and its often only at the last moment that it all comes together.
So today, instead of digging a late prehistoric/Roman and medieval site next to a pub in the Cotswolds, I am finalising the report on a project I did in Nepal earlier in the year…
Animated fly-through of Khasa Malla nauli
I've just finished processing some of the record shots from the recent fieldwork in Nepal. I'm using Autodesk 123D Catch to stitch digital photographs and create 3-D photogrammetric models of a sample of the monuments so we can see if this is a viable way of recording monuments quickly and accurately. An added advantage is you can easily create animated fly-throughs of the models that give a 3-D impression of the actual monument which is great and has lots of potential uses within a project that aims to help enable heritage tourism.
This 3-D model was created using standard archaeological record shots, for a full 3-D model we'd have needed to take many more photos to cover all the angles, still it gives a good idea of what is possible given a bit of time and a digital camera.
The featured monument is a nauli or waterpoint at Bhurti in Dailekh, West Nepal. It is 20 yards or so from the major Khasa Malla temple site of Bhurti, which has 22 intact temples, plus the remains of potentially many more. I'll add some more fly-throughs as and when I get them processed.
Kankrevihar temple, Surkhet
We are waiting for the last of the team to arrive and are still
in the town of Surkhet, down at about 700m altitude in the middle of a
roughly circular valley surrounded by hills. The town has got increasingly busy over the 13
years since my last visit and has a large bustling bazaar and on a sunny day
like this is a great place to soak up the atmosphere of being back in Nepal.
This morning I went on a short sightseeing
trip to the remains of the Buddhist Kankrevihar temple which is about 15
minutes drive outside Surkhet on a wooded hill in the centre of the valley.
 |
| View of temple platform, surrounded by carved stones |
The temple had either collapsed or been destroyed at some
point in the past and the site was
Unfinished business in the Himalaya
In 1998 I spent two months walking across Nepal from the southern Terai to
the mountains and valleys north of Jumla. Logistically the expedition was
totally self-supporting (bar the odd bit of spinach) and worked its slow way
across a changing landscape from the flat plains of the Terai through arid foothills, across alpine
meadows to wide gravel valleys with braided rivers, lush terrace systems and dense
forested slopes. The aim was to carry out a reconnaissance of surviving
monuments along a 'royal road' between the Summer and Winter capitals of a
medieval kingdom that helped shape modern Nepal: the Khasa Malla.
 | |
| Camp at contemporary temple site at Dullu |
CVs for fieldwork jobs
I was reading this post about CVs on Doug's Archaeology site, its one of two good posts Doug has written on CVs, the other one is here. I wrote an article back in 2010 for the Diggers' Forum on CVs and thought I would repost it here, its a rough guide to archaeological CVs, plus how to get hired without the magical '6 months of commercial experience'. It was originally published in the Forum Dispatch Issue 5.
Professional archaeology is still a small world where most people will know someone who knows you, but the days of getting jobs down the pub and by word of mouth are (mostly) gone. This article gives some advice for the those looking for site work. It is primarily intended for those at the start of their career but the advice is just the same for old lags struggling to cope with the baffling world of email applications and HR forms.
Professional archaeology is still a small world where most people will know someone who knows you, but the days of getting jobs down the pub and by word of mouth are (mostly) gone. This article gives some advice for the those looking for site work. It is primarily intended for those at the start of their career but the advice is just the same for old lags struggling to cope with the baffling world of email applications and HR forms.
Integrating excavation and analysis on urban excavations
Text of presentation to CAAUK 2013, video of the presentation is available on Doug's Archaeology blog HERE.
This paper is from the
perspective of an archaeologist who works principally on urban sequences, I am
neither a technophile nor a complete Luddite, but Guy [Hunt, Partner at LP: Archaeology] felt it would be good to
get a digger’s input into the debate.
I wrote the initial abstract
after a conversation with Guy, and as with all things it has evolved into
something more or less completely different. What I’d like to talk about is
some of the issues around technology on site –from a fieldworker’s perspective-
using London as an example, and with a case study of where we have been
successfully using new technology.
First off I think its worth
giving a brief run down of London’s archaeological landscape –in terms of how
we excavate and analyse our sites:
CAAUK 2013
The Computer Methods and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology -UK Conference (CAAUK) is being held in London on the 22nd-23rd February, hosted by L-P: Archaeology. The programme and abstracts are now out, and it looks like a really good mix of papers. I will be giving a paper on urban excavation and analysis techniques that will look at how we can use computer applications to create elegant systems and enable better excavation:
For the last 40
years the excavation of urban sites has increasingly been characterised by the
use of single context recording; for the last 25 years the post-excavation
analysis of these sites has been increasingly characterised by a system of
aggregation into larger stratigraphic groups (context<subgroup<group<landuse).
These systems have been increasingly integrated with digital recording systems,
databases and GIS systems. It is a testament to the logic and rigour of the
original processes that they generally work very well within the digital
systems that have been developed.
http://www.lparchaeology.com/caauk/integrating-excavation-and-analysis-on-urban-excavations/
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