Mick Morrison's Archaeology Blog

Moved to a new site

2009-10-15T07:52:00.000+10:00

Dear Readers,

I have decided to relocate my blogging activities to a new site and this will be my last post at this URL.

I don't want to presume that current subscribers will want to be automatically transferred to my new RSS feed, and so haven't tried to transfer subscribers across. You can however easily subscribe to my new feed at the new site, which is:

http://mickmorrison.com

You can also follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/mickmorrison

Regards,

Mick Morrison

Blog plans

2009-05-24T12:25:00.004+10:00

During my spare time over the past week or two I have been fiddling with the layout for this blog to try to improve its overall appearance. I want a more customised blog that I can use as an online resource for students and others interested in Australian archaeology.

Unfortunately, Blogger is extremely restrictive with what you can do with it, at least for someone who - like me - has only a rudimentary knowledge of website design. I have another blog running wordpress, which overall is a better looking site that is much easier to work on. So, I have decided today to move from blogger to a wordpress installation under another domain name. I am weighing up whether to just create a new site and link to it from here, or to transfer my content to the new site (overall, much harder!). Decisions, decisions!

There are realistically only maybe a handful of posts here that I want to take with me, so at the moment I am leaning toward starting afresh. The site I am moving to is ausarch.com, which I purchased last year and I feel is a good option given where I want to direct my efforts with blogging. This site will remain here, I may use it more like a personal online resume rather than a blog; time will tell!

It is likely that I will have the new site running within a month, so in the meantime I will continue to post here about its development and progress!

Service announcement

2009-05-12T21:19:00.005+10:00

Apologies for the unexpected break in transmission. Normal services will resume shortly.

Well things have been rather hectic here and I thought it important that I briefly explain why my feed of sporadic, semi-regular posts have completely dried up of late.

One word: PhD (ok, yes it's an acronym). I am trying to complete my doctoral thesis and submit this as soon as possible for examination, and to help with this I've taken a break from work and normal life and this - sadly - includes updating my blog. What is it about theses that tend to take up such a large proportion of one's energy and enthusiasm for writing? I think I need to finish before I can answer that question.

In any case, I will be back and will endeavour to follow up on the various series of posts I began before the intermission. I also have some interesting research projects on the agenda this year, mostly focussed on historical archaeological investigations of the various mission settlements at Weipa in Cape York. In the meantime, you can follow me on twitter @mickmorrison.

Free tool to assist with archaeological survey and sampling

2009-03-04T09:13:00.007+10:00

Leszek at Free Geography Tools has written a brief post about using a freeware GIS tool (FGIS) that would be of some value for archaeos engaged in field sampling (on any scale). The tool allows you to create files containing either a series of random points or systematically spaced gridded points. Creating such files is a useful skill most archaeologists will need at some point: for example, I have used random and systematic points for field surveys (eg. to define centre points of areas to survey) or as part of a detailed recording or excavation sampling strategy (eg. to define 1 metre squares on large sites for detailed recording work).

The tool allows you to define a geographic area (polygon) that you would like to sample and then allows you to populate this with points. You can create a random or systematic (grid) distribution of points and can define both point spacing (for grids) or number of points (for random points). Resulting points can be saved as a shapefile, a common and mostly open GIS format as well as a few other formats.

Once you have your shapefile of points you can upload it to most GPS devices using DNRGarmin and similar Windows software, or GPSBabel for fellow Mac users. You can even covert it to display in Google Earth and print the resulting image with Lat/Long or UTM coordinates attributed to each point.

There are more advanced options for doing this with many commercial GIS applications but they're not free and therefore less accessible for students. This method also seems rather low-tech, and low-tech is king on fieldwork in my experience! Also, if you are not already a regular reader of Leszek's blog I highly recommend it as he writes about many useful tools for archaeos.

Links
Check out Leszek's post here.

DNR Garmin website

GPSBabel

FGIS

Australian Archaeology Web Resources @ Ozarch

2009-02-27T10:55:00.004+10:00

Gary Vines and the community of users at the Ozarch Google Group (previously posted about here) have developed a really handy list of Australian Archaeology web resources. It includes Government agencies, Indigenous organisations and other relevant resources and is quite a handy resource that can be accessed here. Group members can edit the document and add new links and resources to the list.

If you're not already a member of the Ozarch Group I highly recommend joining. It is moderated rather well, does not overload your email inbox and appears to be turning into quite a nice little web community.

History of Indigenous wellbeing at Weipa: part 1

2009-02-17T13:34:00.011+10:00

I apologise for the slim offerings to be found here on my blog so far this year. By way of explanation (particularly for my regular readers!) I have had a touch of writers block due to an identity crisis regarding the overall purpose of my blog. To my mind, my blogging seems to have drifted a little away from archaeology and more into technology and gadgets which is not at all where I want to to take it. While relevant, I want to make that type of content more of an aside to posts that are principally about archaeology: it is after all supposed to be an archaeology blog. So in this post I thought I should get the ball rolling again, so to speak, by writing about a research project I am working on at Weipa in northern Australia. It will be split up over a few separate posts, with what follows simply serving as something of an introduction to the issues were are exploring.

Way back in 2005 I was in a meeting with a number of Elders from the Aboriginal community of Napranum (near Weipa). At that stage I was managing an Indigenous land and sea management program, so my role was to liaise with people about land management issues - which almost always came back to heritage management - and obtaining funding to do management oriented projects. Although we were supposed to be discussing weed management issues (a particularly exciting topic I might add), the conversation quickly drifted onto more interesting issues.

The Old Ladies I was meeting with had all grown up in the mission dormitories which, by all accounts, appears to have been a traumatising experience for many. Removed from their families at a very young age they were essentially locked in dormitories at night and were only able to see family on a fairly infrequent basis. Often their only substantive interaction with older kin was during camping trips out bush away from the mission. Along with the need to regularly attend church and school, they were also expected to work which the Presbyterian Mission superintendent considered to be a form of preparation for the practicalities of their adult lives. This meant domestic chores for girls and young women, and gardening and manual tasks for the boys and young men.

During our chat I scribbled down a few quick comments and wish now I had recorded the entire conversation. In particular, in talking about the original mission (which operated from 1898-1932) one of the women stated:

"they were healthier times (at Waypa). Waypandan, that is my mothers land. They ate wallaby, drank Nonda milk, collected ambanum [hairy yam], sugarbag, all those things. We need to tell people about those times"

The quote was quite significant at the time because from earlier work in the area I was well aware of a widely held view at Weipa that bush foods (i.e. bush 'tucker') are considered more healthy than store bought foods. This is because many people associate getting bush foods and being on Country with a sense of health and wellbeing. Simply put, being on Country and eating bush food is good for you in all respects: socially, emotionally, physically, spiritually. In my view, the statement was important because it indicated that the Elders saw a link between history, learning about history, wellbeing and health. Looking at it now, I'm not so sure that this quote best demonstrates this point, but it was certainly the idea that I went away with that day. The other idea that those Old Ladies shared with me was that despite all of their bad experiences, people remember the 'mission days' as a period of comparative health and happiness compared with today. In short, 'they were healthier times' in the sense that health meant more than just physical health as such.

After that meeting it took a further few months of discussions with Elders to develop a research project. We entitled it 'they were healthier times: indigenous health and wellbeing within the Weipa Presbyterian Mission'. The broader project idea was to look at the history of Indigenous health and wellbeing (defined broadly as emotional, physical, social and spiritual health, after Anderson 1996) from an historical perspective. Simply put, our core question was: what was the nature of Indigenous wellbeing throughout the history of missions in the area and how is this relevent to the community today? The project also explores an important view held by community Elders: that younger people in the community do not 'know' the real history of their community, and that learning about this would in fact contribute to improving their wellbeing. This is because they associate a knowledge of history, culture and Country with improved health and wellbeing.

Our evolving project involves recording of oral history, Traditional Knowledge, archaeological surveys around key mission settlements and also work on historical documents. We obtained initial funding from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 2007 and from the Federal Government's Indigenous Heritage Program (IHP) in 2008 and began work on the project in early 2008. Since my original conversations with Elders and anthropologist Darlene McNaughton, several other people have become involved in the project including fellow archaeologist Justin Shiner and more recently historian Geoff Wharton.

Our results are preliminary at this stage, with our first concerted period of fieldwork mid 2008. In the next post I shall write about the original Weipa Mission site which operated from 1898-1932 and the results of archaeological and oral historical work we completed there last year. The photograph below was take in the early 1900s at this site.

From Weipa historical photos

References:
Anderson, I. 1996. Aboriginal well-being. In C. Grbich (Ed.), Health in Australia: sociological concepts and issues (pp. 57-78). Sydney: Prentice Hall.

Research tools and the web: finding and keeping track of references

2009-02-01T12:00:00.002+10:00

The internet has revolutionized the research process providing a range of new, on demand sources for scholarly articles. In today's post I wanted to briefly look at some free tools for finding and keeping track of research sources on the web that I have found useful in writing a PhD and also working as an archaeological consultant.

Finding references: Google Scholar
Most people are familiar with Google Scholar, the search engine that retrieves information about research papers, books and so on. It can be incredibly useful, particularly if you are delving into a new field or research area and you quickly need to identify key sources. Scholar is reliant upon search engines having discovered a source in order for it to show up in your search results. Thus, if a source is not available on the web in the correct format then, logically, it does not show up in scholar search results and so searches on any particular topic might only return a small number of relevant sources available. Typically, there was a bias towards recent journal articles that were on the web.

This was once a real limitation to scholar's usefulness. However, during the past two or three years things have changed as more and more academic sources - both new and old - are being posted to the web. Today, scholar is a powerful tool that returns relatively comprehensive results in many subject areas. You can search for articles by author as well as those which are published within specific journals or in a particular date range; results can be directly imported into your bibliography software (see below). It has its limits though and the number one limitation in my view is scholar's inability to monitor your searches. At present it is not possible (easily and reliably at least) to monitor a particular search for new articles as they appear. For example, if I search for 'coastal archaeology' in December it would be useful for scholar to notify me when a new article appears in those search results in February.

If you've not used scholar for a while it is well worth revisiting. It is constantly improving and is (in my experience) the easiest way to quickly find relevant scholarly articles on the web today.

Zotero
(Zoh-TAIR-oh) is, in the words from their website, "a free, easy to use firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources". It is an open source project based out of George Mason University and is free to install and use without restrictions. It serves three main purposes:

- Collecting sources. Zotero uses bits of code called translators that allow you to import citation information from a website automatically. Many popular journal databases and major libraries have working translators and more are being actively developed. The result: you can visit many major sources of references, search and find what you are looking for and with one click import these into your Zotero bibliographic database. In other words, no more manual entry of citation information into your bibliographic software!

Major journal publishers such as Elsevier as well as Google Scholar, Amazon and many, many other websites are supported.

- Manage your sources. Zotero imports your references into a database file on your Mac or PC which is accessed by using your firefox web browser. You can create folder hierarchies (Zotero calls them 'collections') in which you can store your references. Once you have a source in Zotero you can add tags (keywords), enter notes, create links to any website (e.g. to reviews of a book) and attach a link to a local file or web document. Figure 1 below shows the browser interface.

- Cite sources and create bibliographies. This part of Zotero is important as it allows you to directly cite a source from your database in a document, and automatically create a bibliography of sources cited. I use Word 2008 on a Mac, which is not supported yet, however this function works on most other versions of word and on all versions of open office. You simply install a small add-on, select the reference you want to cite, and you're away.

With these sorts of options Zotero is emerging as a serious stable alternative to commercial bibliographic software such as Procite and Endnote. It's clean, fast, stable and customizable. It's web interface is its real strength. I use it mostly for importing references I find in google scholar: simply run a search on scholar, click the 'Save to Zotero' button and select the references to import.

Figure 1 - The Zotero interface

Citeulike
Citeulike is best compared to a social bookmarking utility for scholarly articles. Users create their own account and add articles to their library by using a small bookmarklet (a bookmark that opens a pop-up window - see Figure 2, below). This process is automatic for most major journal websites, and so once you find an article you simply click your bookmarklet and it is directly added to your library. Citeulike doesn't yet have the functionality of Zotero so for example, you can not automatically add references from Google Scholar to your library, however most major journal databases do work well.

Citeulike has other advantages that make it a crucial part of my work flow at the moment, mainly because it supports web feeds. All users have a web feed, meaning that others can subscribe to your feed and be notified when you add a new reference. You can also create and subscribe to feeds published by groups, for example I have created the group "Archaeology and Palaeoenvironments of the Australia-Pacific" which is open for anyone to join. Any members of this group will be automatically notified of new references added to the group's library. So, for me the great value of citeulike is that it makes it much easier to share references between people interested in similar areas.

Figure 2 - Citeulike bookmarklet pop-up

So in summary, my web workflow consists of the following:

1) find references in scholar, citeulike or by browsing journal websites;
2) add my reference to citeulike OR zotero depending on which platform allows me to automatically import my reference;
3) download the article PDF to my computer;
4) export the citation from Zotero or citeulike into my local endnote library (one click);
5) attach the PDF to the endnote item; and finally,
6) read!

It may seem like a lengthy process but in most cases it takes me only 1-2 minutes to find, import and cite a new reference using these tools. Zotero is rapidly improving and will soon allow users to share libraries, thereby replacing much of the functionality of citeulike. Although for many using these sorts of tools may be quite new, they are typically very easy to use and can speed up the time it takes to find and manage your research sources.

I'd be interested to hear from others who use these or other tools or have suggestions for improving this system. You can do so in the comments below.

Links:

Google Scholar

Zotero

Citeulike

My citeulike library

Citeulike group: archaeology and palaeoenvironments of Australia and the Pacific

Ozarch on the road again!

2009-01-08T21:49:00.002+10:00

Anyone familiar with the recent demise of the Australian archaeology list-server, Ausarch-L may be interested to know there is now an alternative: Ozarch.

The new list has been established via Google Groups which is much more flexible than a traditional email list-serve. You can elect to read posts on the web (like a forum), subscribe via the feed, or receive emails; overall a much better set of alternatives to email-only lists which I find quite restrictive. I was a member of the Ausarch list from '97 or '98 until it ended late last year and often found that similar debates and questions would regularly reappear (most frequent being 'where do I buy an <insert obscure item of archaeology related equipment here>!). Hopefully this will now be reduced.

More importantly though the new list is moderated and membership is restricted to people with some sort of specific qualification or interest in archaeology. I urge students particularly to subscribe as the type of information you recieve via these types of lists can be really important.

More information can be found here.

Download web maps to your garmin GPS

2009-01-07T20:41:00.001+10:00

Readers may be interested in a new service from Garmin that allows you to download results from web-based mapping applications directly into your Garmin GPS device. Window's Live and Google Maps both support the service which I suspect exports the results of web based searches for directions (i.e. drive 200 m to X road, turn left at Y street...) as a route then uploads this to the GPS.

It's a simple browser plugin that works on Windows and the Mac and is apparently compatible with any Garmin GPS that is able to connect to your computer via USB. It's free and can be found here:

http://www8.garmin.com/products/communicator/faq.jsp

I found this service on the Free Geography Tools blog: if you have a background in archaeology, earth sciences or other allied fields and you use 'maps' (which will be all of you!) I highly recommend visiting. Many tips for free software, web services and so on.

Holocene climate change: some useful reviews

2008-12-30T14:49:00.001+10:00

At the moment I am reading up on evidence for climatic variability during the past 5,000 years or so as part of my PhD dissertation. There is a fairly substantial and specialised body of literature in this area in journals such as Quaternary Science Review, The Holocene, Quaternary International and so on. Research in this area proceeds at a very swift pace with numerous new publications being produced each year that can have important implications for models of past environments in specific regions or at a global level.

As a non-specialist it can be a little difficult to access this body of knowledge without first consulting an authoritative overview of many other more specialised (and often arduously complex!) sources. There are several publications that I thought I would quickly highlight here today which may be of relevence to anyone interested in writing or learning about Holocene climate change.

Figure 1: Reconstructed temperature for the past 2000 years*

Climate change 2001: the scientific basis
The first is a book published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) entitled 'Climate change 2001: the scientific basis' and edited by Houghton et al (1). This report was developed as a contribution to the IPCC Third Assessment Report and is intended to provide "...the most comprehensive and up-to-date scientific assessment of past, present and future climate change" and to "...form the standard scientific reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences" (2). The book principally focusses upon analysing and assessing evidence for recent climate change and in particular those changes bought on by increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases however as part of this it reviews evidence for past environmental change, particularly in the past few thousand years. It is written in a very accessible style and provides clear explanations of key concepts and terms that appear regularly in more specialised publications (such as 'climate forcing', 'proxy indicators'). Chapters 1 and 2 are probably of most relevance to people interested in understanding past climatic systems. Almost a decade has passed since it was published and thus new data are available from more specialised sources, however this book nevertheless provides a readily accessible starting point for anyone interested in understanding past climates.

The full report can be accessed online at no cost here

Mid- to late Holocene climate change, Wanner et al 2008
A second comprehensive technical paper of note has recently been published in Quaternary Science Reviews by Wanner et al 2008 entitled 'Mid- to Late Holocene climate change: an overview'. As it is written for a specialised audience this particular article may not be for everyone however it provides a comprehensive review of proxy-based climatic reconstructions which apply to the past 6,000 years. It is global in coverage and aims to develop an explanatory framework for climate change and variability during the past 6000 years or so. Unfortunately, it is not freely available and you will need institutional or library access of some type, or you can purchase it online at the link below. You can download the citation directly into a bibliographic database from my citulike webpage.

The abstract is available online at the Elsevier website.

* Note: Figure 1 is a Creative Commons licenced image created for Global Warming Art, originally prepared by Robert A. Rhode. It is not drawn from either of the sources I have discussed in this post. It represents a comparison of 10 different published reconstructions of mean temperature changes over the past 2000 years and is simply included here to highlight the extent of recent (past 2000 years) climate change.

A quick comment on my site feed

2008-12-18T14:40:00.004+10:00

There are two ways to receive notifications about updates to this site without visiting the site itself: using a feed and reading my posts in a feed reader such as Google Reader OR by subscribing to the email newsletter service (link is in the sidebar). Both work and have their advantages and disadvantages.

For those of you who subscribe to my site feed please note I am about to switch over to using Feedburner, a service that provides me with more information about who is reading my blog and I hope a better product for my readers.

So, by the time anyone reads this, the old feed address will be redirected to feedburner. Importantly, you don't need to lift a finger at all. It will happen automagically. Although I don't expect any problems during the changeover, I wanted to throw up a quick post here in case something does go wrong for some of my readers. So if you do have any problems you simply need to update the subscription address in your feed reader to the following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/mickmorrisonsarchaeologyblog/

Please post a comment here if you have any problems.

Thanks!

Publishing with Google Earth and Google Map products

2008-12-15T10:00:00.002+10:00

Google Earth and Google Maps are both wonderfully useful resources for archaeologists and people in allied disciplines. Google Earth in particular is a quite a powerful little program largely because of its simple, intuitive interface and the fact that it is free. But can students, researchers or academics use these images from a copyright perspective?

Google earth's (GE) simplicity of use is a little deceiving. Although you would be hard pressed to carry out spatial analyses, you can effectively use GE to display and manage quite a diverse range of information. For example, with a little effort it is possible to display data from your GPS, spatial data from spreadsheets and tables, photographs, background images (such as topographic maps) and aerial photos. This can all be achieved at no cost using freely available and/or open source software options. All in all, you can create some decent, publication-quality maps within GE and export the result as a stand-alone image file.

Despite its usefulness though, I have not yet noticed GE images used in an academic publication and so until recently had wrongly assumed that this was because there were severe restrictions associated with the use of such images. After all, large corporations such as Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Google can get a little nasty when it comes to dealing with copyright breaches.

However, Google are quite accepting of people using their images for a range of purposes and across different media. When you use their software or web applications you are required to do so in a manner consistent with their End User License Agreement (EULA) and terms of service which includes the concept of 'fair use'. In the case of images, 'fair use' includes using in them in a non-commercial context and providing full attribution to Google and their content providers. In other words you must ensure that the copyright attribution text and Google logo are included in the image, in full, and are not obscured or dramatically reduced in any way. I have highlighted the relevant information in the image below.

Google (or its licensors) retain the rights to an image (i.e. own the imagery) even when you remove that imagery from their web applications or software. If you follow their requirements for attribution then they suggest 'fair use' includes the following end uses for images exported from their applications:

on a website by embeding some code (You can see an example from my own blog here) or an actual image, as well as in streaming movies, webcasts, slideshows and so on. It is actually very simple to embed Google Maps products into your website using the steps at the Google latlong blog;
broadcasting that image on a one-time use basis on television. You need to apply for special permission for use of their imagery where it will be broadcast an unlimited number of times, such as on TV or in a movie;
print use, and in this respect they suggest :"you may use Google Maps and Google Earth content including photographic imagery in brochures, marketing collateral, packaging...newspapers, academic publications, journals and books".
Educational use including in "classroom, museum, research or academic (non-textbook) publication(s) provided you adhere to all terms of servce".

This suggests that it is perfectly acceptable and legal to use Google Earth images in both modified and unmodified forms in, say, essays or reports written as part of your studies, academic theses, conference presentations, lectures, seminar presentations, academic journals and academic books. Consultancy reports may be a more complicated matter because they are fundamentally a commercial use of that image, and this would require special permission. However consulting reports are typically very low volume and are not technically a publication, so it may be feasible: in any case you would need to apply for special permission from Google.

Personally, I think this is fantastic, particularly for people such as students who may not need more sophisticated GIS functionality in their images or maps. Although both Google Earth and Maps are useful for this purpose in their own right, there are many sources of free data that would allow one to create some quite impressive maps by adding overlays of contours, water courses, geology, vegetation and so on to your background Google Earth images. I'll endeavour to write more about this in future, so stay tuned!

Importantly, I should state that before using Google imagery products for any purpose you should read and understand the Google Maps/Earth Permission Guidelines (link below) as well as the relevent EULA, Terms of Use and Terms of Services documents for the product you are using. Links to these can be found below. It also goes without saying that this article definitely does not consititute legal advice.

As always, comments, tips or questions welcomed using the comments field.

Links:
Google Earth
Google Maps
Google Earth/Maps permission guidelines

Archaeology store

2008-12-12T06:10:00.003+10:00

[this is not a paid advertisement!]

Regular readers may notice some minor changes in the sidebar of my humble site with the addition of an 'archaeology resources' section. I was contacted by Markus from archtools, a UK based website specialising in archaeological tools and equipment. They have some great gear, much of which I know is difficult to source here in Australia where there are probably not quite enough archaeologists to warrant a niche business like this.

They have some items that readers in Australia might have trouble sourcing including good quality trowels (i.e. WHS and Marshall Town), small tool sets, pottery guages, pottery recording kits and tool rolls along with a range of other items that are less specialised (like spades).

Being in Australia, my first question was about postage. Apparently small items such at trowels are not prohibitively expensive, less than $10 (au currency). Anyway, if you're in the market for a new trowel then check them out.

Links: archtools

Off to AAA!

2008-12-02T16:49:00.004+10:00

I'm off to the AAA annual conference in Noosa today (For non-Aussie readers that's the Australian Archaeological Association). I have posted about our paper and the session I am co-convening before so there is no need to repeat myself here. I hope to throw up a few posts about the conference over the next few days, with any luck some pictures too, as well as a short summary of how our session goes. It all depends on the availability of wifi, so finger's crossed.

The program looks good, I heard some gossip that there are expected to be some fiery exchanges between a few prominent people (who shall remain nameless here) during the session on the Burrup Peninsula. Readers unfamiliar with this area should take a quick look at this website. I'm also looking forward to the session on the archaeology of the recent past, the AACAI session and the Burrup sessions. As I said, I'll post more information here over the next few days as time and wifi connectons permit. So stay tuned, folks!

Old Sydney Town

2008-11-30T09:18:00.001+10:00

I stumbled across this wonderful series of paintings and engravings of ca. 1820s Sydney posted on Bibiodyssey. They include a range of views of Botany Bay, Sydney, various houses and gardens and so on. I suspect readers with an interest in the history of early European settlement in Sydney will enjoy looking at this collection, which seems to be a selection from a few varied sources. More details and all the images at Bibliodyssey.

David Horton on the web: from archaeology to watermelons and social justice

2008-11-27T08:36:00.003+10:00

I am pleased to say that I have just rediscovered a wonderful blog by David Horton, a self proclaimed 'greeny', social justice advocate and - in a former life or career? - rather eminent archaeologist. Recent topics he has written about include politics, health, environmental management, financial markets, welfare and twitter (and that was just his front page). I first discovered it a year or more ago but only stopped by to read it recently.

His writing style is rather enjoyable:

Unfortunately he does not write about archaeology on his blog, though he does touch on history regularly. I remember reading quite a bit of Horton's work as an archaeology undergraduate: 'the burning question: Aborigines, fire and Australian ecosystems'; 'Water and woodland: the peopling of Australia' and of course his book 'Recovering the tracks: the story of Australian archaeology'. I think this latter work is probably the most thorough and useful review of the development of archaeology in Australia written to date, largely because through the use of extensive quotes and extracts from original works, he highlights a sense of the philosophies of early workers and the significance of their contributions at the time. It was never a set reading for me as a student, I suspect now that it was not written in a format that would have been immediately accessible for undergraduates (or for that matter, for hurried lecturers seeking a few easy 'dot points' for their power point presentation!).

I guess the big question I have is what happened to Horton's career in archaeology? I am unable to find any academic references to his work after the mid 1990s. I suspect it was a choice on his behalf to try something new or do different things, such as gardening (which in my view is an admirable choice!), his blog certainly suggests he is a man of many talents. But I shall investigate and report back. Oh, his blog is called 'Green views' and can be found here. I recommend subscribing.

References:
Horton, D.R. 1981. Water and Woodland: the peopling of Australia. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter, 16, 21-27.
Horton, D.R. 1982. The burning question: Aborigines, fire and Australian ecosystems. Mankind, 13(3), 237-251.
Horton, D. 1991. Recovering the tracks: The story of Australian Archaeology. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

The archaeologists mobile field lab (and home)

2008-11-24T10:10:00.001+10:00

The picture below is a sketch that a slightly eccentric Uncle of mine drew while visiting a few months ago. We were discussing how difficult the logistics of archaeological fieldwork can be, particularly where you are working in remote areas. Camping in remote locations can be difficult, even with a small team, but add to that the special requirements of a field research program and the need for power, additional storage space, work areas and so on and you have a real logistical headache.

My Uncle had recently designed and built his own camping trailer and there on the spot decided he would do the same for me in an attempt to build the ultimate rig for a roving archaeologist. He sketched out this basic schematic for me and the rig is under construction as we speak. The key touches that will make it useful for my purposes include:

Power courtesy of a solar panel and battery
80 litres of built in water storage
Large, completely sealed and positively pressured storage area (to keep fine dust out)
Fold out computer desk
Large fold out work benches which can be used for basic lab work, consulting maps, food preparation, sleeping or cooking
2 sealed drawers for equipment or stores
A quickly erected heavy duty shelter that mounts from the trailer frame

I'll post more here as the trailer develops. If readers have any thoughts or ideas on additions to make this idea better I'd be happy to hear them - just add a comment below!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Mississippian mound for sale

2008-11-04T15:50:00.010+10:00

This story from St Louis in the US highlights a rather ineffective heritage management system (or lack thereof): a Mississippian earth mound which had a residential dwelling constructed on it in the late 1920s is up for sale. The fact that the house is on a ~2000 year old heritage site has apparently added some value to the property:

"One of the reasons that [the USD$400,000] price tag is on it is to discourage people who would want to (demolish) the mound," Maibes said, noting that the owner wants a buyer who will act as a custodian for the site. (The mound, but not the house, was listed in 1984 on the National Register of Historic Places. That designation doesn't prohibit an owner from damaging or even destroying the mound.)

The article suggests the mound is the last surviving example of an intact Mississippian mound in St Louis though it has never been the subject to any detailed investigations. Local heritage laws are evidently quite flimsy if property owners are the ones who make the final decision on management of features such as this. I may be being a little too skeptical but it will be interesting to see whether the property sells for the asking price. If it were in Australia (or at least in the parts of Australia that I work) it would most likely go under the bulldozer fairly quickly if there were no legislative provisions for the protection of Indigenous cultural heritage.

The original story comes courtesy of the St Louis Times Today

Here are some other links to information on Mississippian mounds. They really are quite fascinating sites!

Ocmulgee Mounds virtual tour

Mississippian chronology and general information

And of course, the Wikipedia entry..

gvSIG - new opensource GIS software

2008-10-20T09:53:00.006+10:00

I recently received an email update from Oxford Archaeology Digital via the IOSA email listserv about gvSIG, an open source Geographical Information System (GIS) platform. This is a project that I was not aware of until now but which seems to be focussed on the development of a user friendly GIS for Windows and Linux (and hopefully, one day, Mac!). From the blurb on the OAD website and in their Quickstart guide it seems promising:

The government funded gvSig project is a free and open source Geoinformation System (GIS), that enables you to interactively visualize, manage, modify and analyze spatial information in the form of digital maps, images and database tables. It is easy to learn, yet versatile and efficient enough for demanding GIS tasks. Above all, it is freely available, at no charge and under a license that emphasizes your freedom of use rather than restrictions. It is also a cross-platform application, based on Sun's Java technology, which currently runs on Windows (2000/XP/Vista), Linux and Mac OS X operating systems, giving you great flexibility in its deployment.

I don't fully understand the need to develop another standalone opensource GIS platform given the decent options out there for both entry level/user friendly (i.e. Mapwindow and QGIS) and more sophisticated (i.e. GRASS GIS) software that have been around for years. I'm also not clear as to whether this software is oriented toward archaeological applications given that it has been developed by OAD. The quickstart guide indicates that it has many features that are available in both Mapwindow and QGIS and various screenshots suggest that dialogue windows have a strong resemblence to those in the commercial GIS software Arcview/Arcmap from ESRI.

Personally, I think it looks interesting and I hope it is more archaeologically focussed than other open source alternatives that are out there at the moment. One useful set of features to include for archaeologists would be tools for spatial analysis; these are often absent from many commercial and opensource GIS platforms. Even ESRI's Arcmap (which retails for around AUD $6-8000 last I checked) requires the purchase of an additional extension to enable this type of functionality. At present gvSIG is at version 1.1.2 with active development on V2.

New research on Arnhem Land rock art

2008-09-28T09:06:00.004+10:00

Daryl Guse, a PhD candidate working on Aboriginal rock art in the Wellington Ranges area, western Arnhem Land (Northern Territory) recently forwarded me a link to a story on his research.

In a find that has stunned archaeologists and anthropologists, a vast wall of about 1500 paintings chronicles the history of Aboriginal contact with outsiders, from Macassan prows and European sailing ships to 19th-century steamships and a World War II battleship.

Alongside exquisite rock art more than 15,000 years old are paintings that capture some of the 19th and 20th centuries' most important technological innovations - a biplane, bicycle, car and rifle - as well as portraits of church ministers, sea captains and traders.

It's a good story and the photo gallery has some fantastic images that are well worth taking a look at. This is only Daryl's first field season as a PhD candidate (though he has been working in the area for years) and so I don't think he has published any results as yet.

Links:
Sydney Morning Herald story and photo gallery

Fieldwork blogging hiatus

2008-09-21T11:00:00.002+10:00

Because I'm not set up to blog whilst on fieldwork there may be a series of hiatus' between posts over the next few months due to extensive fieldwork commitments. You see, here in north Queensland it is the late dry season, a lovely time of year that is often rapidly followed by the wet season when the monsoon moves south from the equator and it literally buckets down. It means that most archaeological fieldwork is difficult if not impossible between about January and April as creeks flood, roads are cut and grass everywhere grows about 1.5 metres in height.

From a fieldwork point of view it is good to get as much as you can done in the late dry season before it starts to rain in the wet and so I have scheduled quite a lot of fieldwork between now and December, both in Cape York, the Cairns area and in south western Queensland. It's mostly work-related fieldwork however one of the research projects I am working on with Darlene McNaughton and Justin Shiner is an AIATSIS funded project investigating Indigenous wellbeing in an early 20th Century Presbyterian Mission. We are using oral history and archaeology to understand more about the impact of the mission on peoples' wellbeing and plan on doing around 8 days on the site this year before it rains. We are working with the Anhatangaith Traditional Owners and have a few volunteers as well, so it will be a good trip.

I will try and write new posts as time and internet connections permit. I would recommend that irregular readers or people who have discovered my little blog for the first time subscribe using the link on the top right hand side. That way, next time I post, you will recieve it via email.

Arcview on a mac?

2008-09-21T10:33:00.002+10:00

A little while ago I purchased a new macbook pro after discovering that they now run Windows. As far as laptops go, MBPs are brilliant: they take no time at all to to configure out of the box, are simple to use, backup and recover. They are wonderful as a writing and research tool and lets face it, the MBP looks cool as well.

Archaeologists however can never really move away from using Windows in some way. Various important software packages are only available on this OS: Sofware for radiocarbon calibration, survey, CAD, GPS and GIS are typically shackled to Windows. One of the most crucial Windows programs I use for research and consultancy work is Arcview. For the uninitiated, Arcview is a fairly capable and widely used GIS program that allows one to display, manage and analyse spatial data such as site locations, environmental data, infrastructure and development information and so on.

Arcview will only ever be a windows application and so jumping over to a Mac has mean that I needed to get Windows working on my Mac well enough so that I can seemlessly move between my Windows and Mac environments, without restarting my computer. Although this is all possible it has taken me a while to get it working well on my Mac and so in this post I simply wanted to highlight some key tips for people in similar situations.

Bite the bullet and install bootcamp. There are other ways to run windows in a mac, without needing to partition your hard disk, but after multiple attempts I found that they were all really quite slow when it came to working with large datasets. Bootcamp will run any windows program at normal (i.e. 'native') windows speeds. Use it, it's a free part of OSX.
Give yourself space to move. When you create your bootcamp partition, give yourself at least 6 gigabytes for Windows PLUS whatever is required for your windows applications. If you think you will have 30 gig of data, give youself that much space. I initially tried leaving my arcview data on the Mac partition however it was very slow to load on the windows side and some datasets would not load at all. I then tried an external firewire hard drive which was faster, but still sluggish and caused other problems. With arcview at least, there is nothing as fast or functional as having your program and data on the same drive. Use an external drive for backups.
Format your bootcamp partition in NTFS. Bootcamp guides will tell you that you must use FAT32: ignore that advice. There are benefits and disadvantages to both and despite what you read the main point is that both drives will be accessible from inside each operating system when you eventually install the VM software. Most importantly, if you use NTFS then you can very easily backup the whole bootcamp/windows installation using your mac and reinstall without a fuss when things go wrong. So, once you proceed to installing windows on your bootcamp partition make sure you tell the Windows installer to format your partition as NTFS.
Purchase and install parallels. Once you have everything installed in bootcamp and Windows has done its crazy 'update for 2 days' thing, shut down Windows and restart your mac in OSX and then purchase and install parallels. After you install it on your mac running windows is very simple. You simply run parallels and then select 'my bootcamp' from the main menu and your Windows bootcamp install will open in its own window (which is resizable, etc). From here you can run arcview.
Create a clean install recovery image. It may take a few days to get your Windows XP install and other software and external device drivers (GPS for instance) running. Once you are happy that you have the perfect set up then download a nifty little Mac program called winclone. This program makes a compressed copy (disk image) of your entire windows partition that includes all of your Windows updates, drivers and software. This backup image can be reloaded onto your NTFS Windows partition at any time so that you can quickly revert to a clean install without having to go through the entire process again. This is useful to two reasons. (a) Windows will eventually die on you at a very inconvenient time, thus requiring a full reinstall, and (b) if you find you need more or less space on your windows partition, you can resize the partition and reinstall a fresh copy of windows very quickly. I needed to resize my Windows partition from 10 gig to 40 gig and using Winclone, managed to do so in less than an hour!

And that's it! After running arcview for several weeks this way I have not noticed any reduction in performance or any other errors, even with large raster datasets that often cause problems.

AAA conference 2008: the land and sea session

2008-09-12T07:50:00.005+10:00

A few months back I posted about a session that Daryl Guse, Cameo Dalley and I had proposed for the Australian Archaeological Association conference in Noosa this year. You can read that post here, but in short, the session was looking for papers about the way in which cultural heritage management is undertaken in the context of Indigenous Land and Sea Management programs in Australia. At the time we proposed the session we wondered whether it would attract much interest, however it seems it has. We had 14 papers proposed and have accepted 12 of those to go into the program. They cover a broad range of geographic areas with presenters coming along to discuss work in the Torres Strait, Mornington Island, eastern and western Arnhem Land, the Pilbara coast in north west Australia, several papers from southern Western Australia, another from the lower Murray area near Adelaide, western Victoria, western New South Wales and finally, several papers from the Wet Tropics area around Cairns. We are quite excited by the level of interest, particularly given that the session is not really about traditional archaeology (it is an archaeology conference after all).

My own paper is a joint presentation with Darlene McNaughton - my partner and an anthropologist at James Cook University. Our abstract is:

A foot in the door: mining, cultural heritage and Indigenous cultural and social values around land management

This paper explores the issue of managing indigenous cultural and social values around land and sea management in the context of large-scale mining related development in western Cape York Peninsula. There is little question of the important role that Land and Sea Centres play in managing these values: an emerging problem however is how to ensure these values are identified and managed in contexts where viable Indigenous land and sea management programs do not exist. This is a particular concern in the context of large scale mining related developments where existing Indigenous land management regimes may not be able to effectively deal with the scale and extent of land management issues bought on by mining. Without early identification it arguably becomes more difficult for Traditional Owners to have cultural and social values around a range of land and sea management issues incorporated into environmental management strategies of mining companies. Here we argue that cultural heritage management frameworks can support Indigenous land management regimes in such contexts by providing an opportunity for the early identification of social and cultural values around land and sea management.

The paper will be a little more heritage-centric than this abstract reads however we think it highlights some important issues that are often not discussed in the context of cutlural heritage management.

Blogging for graduate students

2008-07-26T07:11:00.000+10:00

John Hawks has an excellent series of essays on blogging, research and academia. John's blog has been around for years - from at least 03 or 04 as far as I remember, and he's also an active palaeoanthropologist. I must admit that not being a palaeoanthro, I find that some of his content is a little outside my areas of interest but I nevertheless do enjoy reading his blog. Anyway, the first couple of essays in his 4 part series are:

Graduate students and blogging

How to blog and get tenure

The most salient points for me is that blogging is not necessarily a bad thing for a professional to engage in and that there are some distinct benefits for graduate students who start out writing early in their careers. He writes:

I'd like to advocate for a model of blogging that many graduate students might find useful. If I were starting out today, I'd blog my dissertation. Why not? Is there really anything so secret in your history and literature review that it couldn't be read by the few hundred people who will find your blog?

I think the other important point is that blogging is not research and one should not allow it to impact on writing grant applications, theses, publications and so on. He warns:

You start out writing a few posts about your work, and comment negatively on creationism. And then you spend your time online reading stupid posts from intelligent design blogs, just so that you can refute them. Soon your mind starts to decay, and then you can't do your actual research anymore.

I run a small archaeology consultancy which is basically a full time job. I schedule dedicated time for my research and treat that time with the reverence it deserves, after all, at the end of the day what counts is the quality of the research I do and the level of my outputs - not my blog's page rank or subscriber count. I approach blogging a little like the conversations that happen over coffee between sessions at conferences: a chance to talk informally about your research, recent news and new methods or ideas, as well as providing opportunities to meet new people. The great thing about the web though is that it is accessible to a much larger number of people with similar interests. There is a real potential for a blog to have negative impact on your career though. For example, gossip, poorly thought through arguments or just plain bad writing are just as damaging in a blog as they would be if you took the same approach to conversations at the conference bar.

Although I've been reading and commenting on blogs for years, this is the first time I have stuck with one (there were several abandoned attempts in 04 and 06), so I can't really speak to the benefits of blogging yet. But John's blog has been around for a good while and his tips and tricks are well worth taking note of. And if you're an Australian archaeologist, consider starting something: as far as I am aware there are only a couple of active bloggers out there and the more the merrier!

Picture credits - Laughing Squid's photostream on flickr (creative commons license)
Links - John Hawks Anthropology Weblog

Shell mounds on google earth

2008-07-25T13:07:00.000+10:00

I just read a post on how to embed interactive google maps in webpages, so thought I should give it a go. Below are some particularly prominent shell mounds at Weipa - they are the white and grey coloured areas that stand out from the background vegetation. The shell mound photo I included in a recent post was taken in this area. You might need to zoom in a little to see the mounds - I haven't found out how to display the maps at a set height at this stage.

View Larger Map