SEAArch – The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

Readers might be interested in this course by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property. Deadline for applications on 20 June 2010.

Cultural Heritage Protection in the Asia – Pacific Region 2010: research, analysis and preservation of archaeological sites and remains
7 September – 7 October 2010
Cultural Heritage Protection Cooperation Office, Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO in Nara Prefectural Government ‘Horen’ Office, Nara, Japan
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Nigel J. Hetherington from Past Preservers.com sends word that they are conducting a Media Training programmme targeted at historians, anthropologists and archaeologists to develop presentation skills for the screen.

The next programme will be held over the May 21st weekend in the UK and more information can be found on the Past Preservers blog.

Just a quick link to Colleen’s poll at Middle Savagery, where she’s taking a poll from archaeological professionals on whether people still use film photography for archaeology (or you could go directly to the poll here).

The poll got me thinking about the amount of photography I’ve had to do for my research. At the current count, I have taken 7,892 pictures which works out to be about 219 rolls of film (35mm x 36 exposures); with a redundancy factor of about 3 (as in I take 3 pictures of every shot I take), that’s about 2,630 images or 73 rolls of 35mm film. Viva la digital!

I end off my series on using a pole camera for archaeology (check out Parts 1: The Problem, 2: Field Test and 3: Parts list) with some evaluative notes about the use of the polecam, some things I might want to try out for later, and the cost of the whole setup.

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You’ve seen the polecam in action in the last post, in this post we’ll take a closer look at the polecam rig, the parts I used and the factors I considered for each part.

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In the first post, I wrote about how I got into Pole Aerial Photography, along with the requirements and constraints I was working under. In this post, I’m going to introduce my pole photography setup and how it worked in the field.

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In this series of posts I’ll be blogging about how I put together a pole camera to help me conduct some archaeological work, and how to put together one yourself, if you’re so inclined. 10 months ago, I conducted an archaeological investigation of a rock art site which involved very little excavation, but relied heavily on photography as the primary means of recording. The bulk of the rock art was located on a cliff face 15-35’ above the surface. To access the art up close, I hired a contractor to erect a scaffold in front of the cliff face, which allowed me close access to most of the paintings. On the other hand, the scaffold had a limited time offer (two weeks) and it cost me nearly half the research grant. And it also didn’t cover all the rock art that I needed to record. To cover the other parts of the rock art that wasn’t accessible by the scaffold, I had to rely greatly on zoom photography, but because some of the areas I needed to photograph were so high, quite a few of the images were skewed.

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