SEAArch – The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

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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For anyone interested in that part of the world, Barry Lewis (a friend of mine whom I met at last year’s rock art course at KL) is releasing a book on the archaeological evidence for hunting in Britain. Click here to download the flyer, and place a pre-order on Amazon using this link: Hunting In Britain: From the Ice Age to the Present

Ok, not really news if you think about it – but good to have more corroborating evidence. This study (open access, too!) shows a distinct mDNA link between the aboriginal Australians and populations from the Indian subcontinent, which lends support to the idea that modern humans migrating out of Africa took a southernly route, hugging the coast, from India, through Southeast Asia and finally into Australia. Quite significantly, the divergence in the mDNA suggests that Australia was populated sometime around 50,000-60,000 years ago, which corresponds quite well to the conclusions derived from archaeology. This in turn implies that Southeast Asia was populated a little earlier, perhaps 70,000 years before present?

photo credit: Kiwi Flickr

Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link
BioMed Central, 22 July 2009
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