What do Archaeologists Do On Their Days Off...?

...They swim with barracuda!

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2018 Field School and a video from the vault

Hard to believe, but we are just five months from the start of the 2018 field school! If you are interested in participating, click on the new Field School tab above for information and how to apply. I will be spending the spring at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, working on making an interactive GIS map of Richard Norwood's 1663 survey of Bermuda, and if all goes well, a walkable 3D version of the island in 1663 in Unity. In doing housekeeping among my many old hard drives, I came upon a video we shot on the last day of the 2010 reconnaissance, showing the very first unit we excavated, and our three-person field crew!  "From small acorns mighty oaks grow..." (Benjamin Franklin)
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End of Week Two

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Ethan and Alice, showing off U of R pride Students wearing this year's official dig t-shirt It's hard to believe how quickly time flies during a field school. Seems like just yesterday everyone was getting off the plane, but we've fused into a well honed team and have made tremendous progress, both educationally and on Oven Site. And we just completed Seventeenth-Century Day, which will get its own blog post a bit later. Since the last installment, We took much of Oven Site down on a plane to the surface of the late 17th-century floor layer. En route, we discerned from among the later quarry rubble a 2-3 course narrow stone wall which had toppled inward - apparently the footing for a wooden sill that supported the frame of the second-period timber frame house. 17th-century floor in foreground, with fallen wall just to the north, looking north This was an important find, since we have not thus far found exterior postholes (as one often finds on 17th-century Chesapeake sites)...
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3D Oven Site model video

Time has flown since July and Bermuda! When I returned to Rochester, I was asked to become director of the university's recently launched Digital Media Studies program, in addition to my "day job" teaching history and being Director of Undergraduate Studies. One great advantage of my new DMS post has been immersing myself in new digital technologies and 3D modelling. At the end of the season, I did an extensive overlapping photo survey of Oven Site to capture it in high detail for analysis after it was filled in. It turns out that processing 267 x 16 megapixel images and making a 3D point cloud and mesh of the site was beyond the ability of my 20GB desktop. UR, however, has Blue Hive, a clustered supercomputer, which was up to the task - 64 CPU cores and 120GB memory - but it still took a whole weekend! The video below does not do justice to the fine detail of the model, but gives you an idea of the interactivity that is now possible. We just opened a new visualization la...
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