February 2014 – Colleen Morgan

The New Gig: EUROTAST

Two of the research fellows in the EUROTAST project, looking at samples in the lab at the University of Bristol.

Last December I had the immense good fortune to join the Archaeology Department at the University of York as a EUROTAST Marie Curie Research Postdoctoral Fellow. I’ve been finding my legs in my new job for the last few months, getting the required equipment, and generally settling in. In practical terms, the position is familiar territory for me—digital media and public outreach—but the subject matter is a radical shift: new scientific methods of investigating the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

While my first excavation investigated the home of formerly enslaved Dallas residents, with Dr. Maria Franklin at the University of Texas, and I have worked on historically disadvantaged and enslaved populations since that time, it was not my major research focus. Also, I understood (to a certain extent) the developments in archaeometry of the last decade, but the specifics were a gloss: I put the sample in a bag and sent it to a specialist who dealt with it.

It has been incredibly eye-opening both in terms of the vast wealth of information that DNA and isotopic analyses has to offer in archaeological research and the emotional toll of studying what can only be described as one of the most tragic chapters in history: the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

(After I finished that last sentence, I sat and looked at it for ten minutes. The TAST takes all the words away.)

So. While my postdoc is incredibly amazing—I heard that it was called the “unicorns and rainbows job”—there is…this. How do I digitally remediate difficult heritage? What considerations do I take when I disseminate research on this incredibly sensitive topic, heritage that hurts? There’s also contending with the rather large new body of literature. I find this a benefit, as it provides an outside perspective that is valuable in outreach in demonstrating the interest and vitality of a subject that feels tedious to a long-term expert in the subject. Anyway, I’ve taken to calling my new job digital heritage on hard mode.

Finally, it is fantastic being at the University of York. There’s great momentum in the Archaeology department and beyond, with the Centre for Digital Heritage, the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past, and the presence of top researchers who are willing to try new things. And we do have some delights in store.

A-Z Archaeology Films: The Antikythera Mechanism: Decoding an Ancient Greek Mystery

Title: The Antikythera Mechanism: Decoding an Ancient Greek Mystery
Year: 2008
Length: 14 minutes
Made by: McMillian Publishers Ltd.
Genre: expository
Authors: Martin Freeth worked for the BBC, but is now producing short documentary films for Nature and the British Medical Journal as well as corporate clients.

Sadly, the video seems to be broken on The Archaeology Channel, so I watched it at this slightly disturbingly named website:

https://shootingpeople.org/watch/54489/the-antikythera-mechanism-decoding-an-a

Nothing like starting your film with a citation. So this film appears to be an overview of an article about…you guessed it…The Antikythera Mechanism in Nature. Cool.

Oooh, nice CG of whirly clockwork things inside the mechanism. Nature must have a capital-B Budget. Of course they do! And the the professional narrator tells us that the video is timely–it tells us about the time table for the earliest Olympics.

Possibly a relation of Martin Freeth, our filmmaker? Anyway, Tony is one of the authors of the paper, and according to his website, a mathematician and filmmaker.

No beards yet, but just LOOK at this photo of Derek de Solla Price. The very soul of an academic. He’s a physicist, by the way. So far we have an astronomer (Mike Edmunds, a mathematician and a physicist checking this thing out. Anyway, de Solla Price figured out the basics of how the mechanism worked, but now we have…BIGGER AND BETTER SCIENCE!

I bet you wish you had a forklift-load of Science. I certainly do. It’s an 8 ton x-ray machine that they brought to Athens to get high-rez data of the mechanism.

The images that the x-ray produced “provide the basis for many of our revelations.” Heeeey, visualization in action!

Tony Freeth sits with an engineer of medieval clocks and they explain the dials to us. There’s an eclipse predictor, a moon phase calculator, and the Olympiad dial shows which games are going on that year.

We are told that the elderly clockmaker (Don Unmin?) will produce a reproduction, but I wasn’t able to find anything about it online.

The Antikythera Mechanism, as an impossibly old, incredibly complicated bit of gear-filled wonder, brings out both the hardcore scientists and the lunatic fringe for theories about the thing. As such it is fantastic to have a video as an exact explanation of what it is, how we know what it is, and how it works. Would that more journal articles would have accompanying videos that show how the written results came to be. This video shows the interdisciplinary nature of research and how incredible things can happen when you bring together different academic fields, technology, and ancient artifacts. Oh, and large wads of cash.

5/5 – Movies about complicated peer-reviewed articles that also debunk theories about aliens and time travelers and show how ancient people did amazing stuff without extraterrestrial help get full marks from me.

Beard count: 0, zilch. No archaeologists featured. But it was full of older white dudes, natch.

BONUS:

Here is the Antikythera Mechanism…in LEGO.

EUScreen: A treasure trove of multinational archaeology film

Screen Shot 2014-02-11 at 3.20.37 PM — A film from 1957, simply titled “Excavation”

I was recommended EUScreen at a meeting, but I’ve only just now had time to check it out. I was happily surprised at the huge amount of archaeology videos they have.

A simple search for archaeology yields 167 films! Here are a few:

Screen Shot 2014-02-11 at 3.09.58 PM — 3000 year old coffin found in Jutland, 1939

Screen Shot 2014-02-11 at 3.13.56 PM — Excavations at Paestum in Italy, 1957

A-Z Archaeology Films: The Anglo-American Project in Pompeii

Screen shot 2013-12-08 at 9.25.36 AM — Dude…nice tiger!

Title: The Anglo-American Project in Pompeii
Year: 2002
Length: 8 minutes
Made by: Black Cat Productions
Genre: expository
Authors: Arthur and Jennifer Stephens are archaeological photographers.

Glum pan-pipes, and then BANG, we’re in. A flat-voiced narrator tells us straight up, no hesitation, that Pompeii dates from the 6th century BC–we get apprised of the conquerers, the Romans, the population. It is truly the robotic almanac of narration. I hope you are taking notes, this will be on the pop quiz after the film.

Screen shot 2014-02-10 at 8.38.19 AM — The sinister peak of Mount Vesuvius, lurking in the background.

We are introduced to the Anglo American Project in Pompeii director, Dr. Rick Jones, who is white, as billed. Beard count so far: 1.

There’s some other guy, but you can tell he doesn’t matter as much because he’s sitting on the floor and filmed at a subordinate azimuth. Don’t worry about the lady in the background, she’s not important in the slightest.

We get to hear about the lofty excavation goals, somehow transmitted through this illegible plan:

They plan to study an entire city block! Okay, that’s pretty cool. And they have a field school…oh holy crap that’s a lot of students:

So we are introduced to the block of Pompeii they’ll be studying. There are bars, houses, a communal fountain, an inn…man those folks are spoiled. So much to look at! Such fantastic preservation! So what are they going to dig?

A possibly modern ramp.

Okay, fair enough, I know we can’t all dig the gold-trimmed bathhouses of the world. This is the kind of task that I’m familiar with. Eighty-year-old toilet? I’m on it. Actually this ramp would be older than that toilet if it was built during the excavations in the 1860s. FML.

The other excavation area is of a pilaster and down pipe that could lead to a cistern that could be used for water storage or a cesspit.

Beard count: 2. I never understand why people wear shorts on excavations.

Spoiler alert: the mystery feature turns out to be a cesspit:

Kinda unsurprisingly, as there was a toilet on the other side of the wall, as they now disclose. Intense infrared video footage confirms that the two connect. This is archaeological magic, y’all.

Let’s go looking for treasure! First, the make-shift tools:

PROTIP: If you have to modify your tools like this, you are probably doing something unsafe. And you will probably hurt your back.

(I would also like to mention here that the glum music is still going, making this the most depressing tale of archaeological discovery ever)

OH GOOD LORD. At least they are wearing hard hats? And not 70s speedo-stylee archaeology?

Nice drain though. And we hear about the finds that came out of the drain and we get to see them as they came out of the dirt and the more official lab photos:

Then we are taken through the various artifact types and the specialists (women, mostly) clean, sort, and analyze the finds.

Overall, the Anglo-American Project in Pompeii does a good job showing the research goals of an excavation, and the execution of these goals, and the conclusions and future questions that arise from such a project. It was well filmed, and the videographers did a good job creating the site narrative and collecting appropriate footage. This is harder than it seems.

Yet the video also reproduces the man-as-digger-and-director and women doing all the household chores of archaeology–they had 60 students and 40 staff on site and we get to see two half-naked dudes in a trench digging a toilet. Where was everyone else? The single voice of the narrator removed all dissenting views and alternate experiences and interpretations. It makes me wonder who they thought the audience was? Government officials? Funders?

Beard count: 2
Beer belly count: 2
Overall: 4/5

Podcasts of Note

Visualising Radio Pop - Tristan Ferne — Visualising Radio Pop – Tristan Ferne

As my bitter rivals in the Archaeologists’ fitbit group (join us!) can attest, I usually walk a few miles a day. While I listen to a lot of music while I write, I let podcasts transport me across the landscape. They’re my television, I suppose. Back in 2010 I recommended a couple of Archaeology Podcasts, and the field has grown considerably since then, but I draw interest and inspiration from other topics.

So, my favorites:

New Yorker: Fiction – These are authors who have published in the New Yorker discussing the short stories of other authors. There is a long prelude and sometimes a long discussion afterwards that talk about the author’s life and the meaning of the story. These can sometimes grate, sadly. Still, I love reading the short stories in the New Yorker and the podcasts are a welcome jolt of incredibly good writing. They’re only uploaded once a month though, so I try to save it for a time when I can listen to it straight through on longer walks & bus rides.

AnthroPod – A newish podcast from the Society for Cultural Anthropologists with very pithy, involved conversations between anthropologists about their research. Particular favorite was John Hartigan on Race, Genomics, and Biology and Michael Fisch on Tokyo Commuter Train Suicides.

Thinking Allowed – A slightly quirky sociology podcast with Laurie Taylor that explores current research articles, generally bringing in the authors of the publications. Can be overly folksy and pseudo-populist, but I like the update about what is going on in one of our sister-disciplines.

This American Life – Yes, I am a member of the cult-like following of this show. For non-Americans, it has a lot of stories that are not necessarily American-specific. If I could only listen to one podcast, this would be it. Good thing there are over 500 episodes.

Radiolab – A broadly-conceived science podcast that follows interesting stories with odd resonance. They also do a lot of overtly reflexive audio editing, which you don’t see very often–compare with Jai Paul’s str8 outta mumbai. They broadcast a mix of in-depth hour-long podcasts with 20-30 minute “shorts” that can be less formal.

Fun stuff:

Escape Pod – Speculative fiction short stories of all stripes–so much so that sometimes they get complaints that the story isn’t actually Science Fiction. One example is The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu, a lovely story steeped in Chinese culture about origami that comes to life. I’m often jealous of the stories, able to describe human interaction and possible realities better than any archaeologist or anthropologist I’ve ever read.

PodCastle – A companion podcast to Escape Pod that I only recently started listening to. The quality, to my ears, is a little bit mixed, but I enjoyed The Calendar of Saints, which is an incense-laden homage to Catholicism and a lady with a sword.

Friday Night Comedy – Dan and I like listening to this political comedy show while we’re cooking dinner. It is, in my opinion, a pale shadow of The Daily Show, but keeps me relatively up-to-date with British politics. May be slightly indecipherable if you don’t live in the UK.

Honorable mentions:

These are podcasts that I’ve downloaded with the intention of listening to them, but haven’t quite gotten to them, or have only listened to a couple of episodes: Welcome to Night Vale, On the Media, Material World, The Heritage Podcast, and From Our Own Correspondent.

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