For the next two weeks I’ll be away in Hanoi for the 19th Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Congress in Hanoi, so I probably will not have time to write as much here. If you are headed for the IPPA Congress as well, hope to meet face-to-face and say hi!
Pole photography for archaeology – Part 4: Evaluations
November 26th, 2009 noelbynature Posted in Fieldwork, General Archaeology, Personal 1 Comment »
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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Pole photography for archaeology – Part 3: Parts List
November 25th, 2009 noelbynature Posted in Fieldwork, General Archaeology, Personal 6 Comments »
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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Pole photography for archaeology – Part 2: Field Testing
November 24th, 2009 noelbynature Posted in Fieldwork, General Archaeology, Personal 3 Comments »
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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Pole photography for archaeology – Part 1: The Problem
November 23rd, 2009 noelbynature Posted in Fieldwork, General Archaeology, Personal 4 Comments »
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.
An “ancient” camera
November 12th, 2009 noelbynature Posted in Personal 2 Comments »
I’m sure, in a couple of thousand years from now, when archaeologists from the future dig up our remains, they will rank this piece of technology as “pretty darn rare”. What makes this camera so special? In an era of compact flash cards, SD cards and even mini and micro SD cards, can you guess what kind of storage media this Early Digital Period camera uses? Answers after the jump!
Rock Art: Just another sign of mental impairment?
June 26th, 2009 noelbynature Posted in General Archaeology, Personal, Rock Art 1 Comment »
There’s an amusing story on BBC from Australia about wallabies being the explanation for crop circles. In the opium farms of Tasmania, wallabies who jump through the fences and eat the poppy end up getting “as high as a kite and going around in circles”, resulting in the familiar crop circles that we love to attribute to beings from outer space. Amusing as it sounds, crop circles, like rock art, can be classified as a type of landscape art, and the narcotic antics of these marsupials show us one possibility behind the rock art left by ancient peoples.
photo credit: Wm Jas
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