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PhD project - Analysis of Middle Bronze Age Palstaves

November 18, 2014 Authors: Robert Kaleta

Hi everyone. My name is Robert Kaleta and I am a 1st year PhD student at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, interested in using some of the data generated via the MicroPasts photo-masking applications for my research. For the next 3 years I will be looking very closely at various aspects of the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) metalwork with particular focus on palstaves. Metal…

Things that go bump in the night: The Selborne-Blackmoor Hoard; the significance of LBA weapon hoards

November 17, 2014 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

Our new app focuses on the wonderful Blackmoor Hoard (partially pictured above). Known also as the ‘Blackmoor-Wolmer Forest’ or ‘Selborne’ Hoard, the hoard was found near the hamlet of Blackmore (just east of Selborne, Hampshire) on the land that was originally part of Lord Selborne’s estate. Multiple hoards from different periods, including various Romano-British coin hoards, have been found in…

3D Models of Olduvai Gorge Handaxes

October 30, 2014 Authors: Ignacio de la Torre

These two handaxes belong to the EF-HR locality, in Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania). EF-HR is located in the North side of the Olduvai Gorge. It was discovered in 1931 by Sir Evelyn Fuchs and Professor Hans Reck, and named after their initials. The first excavations were undertaken by M. Leakey in 1963, and then by OGAP (Olduvai Geochronology Archaeology Project) since 2009. Both handaxes were found in…

MicroPasts Crowd-funding

October 17, 2014 Authors: Daniel Pett Chiara Bonacchi

Hello! We’ve just launched the latest part of the MicroPasts project: a crowd-funding website. Have a look and see if you can help. Through this website, it is possible to raise up to £5,000 to fund archaeological or historical research projects that have been developed and will be undertaken collaboratively by professionals with institutional links (e.g. working in universities, museums…

Crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding; the collaborative management of archaeological heritage

October 06, 2014 Authors: Chiara Bonacchi

A presentation given by Chiara Bonacchi at the 20th annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists, Istanbul, 10-14 September 2014. Chiara

In the Lens: George and Agnes Horsfield’s Photographs

September 08, 2014 Authors: Amara Thornton

Amara Thornton (British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, UCL Institute of Archaeology) My life has been so lonely – until I met you – dear Comrade … my extraordinary friendship with you – which I gradually found was absorbing the whole of my life – I did not in the least understand – you stood as pure intellect to me. – George Horsfield to Agnes Conway, c. November 1931 Everyone loves a love…

MicroPasts at Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne

July 10, 2014 Authors: Daniel Pett

The project has just been represented at the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Shabtis and the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife

June 23, 2014 Authors: Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert

If you’d lived in Ancient Egypt, you would probably have strongly believed that death was not the end, and that it was only a transition between this world and the next. Ancient Egyptians believed that after they die, or more precisely after their bodies die, some parts of their soul (termed ‘ka’ and ‘ba’) kept on living in a spiritual realm known as the underworld, or Duat – the realm of the dead…

Later Prehistoric Britain: the Development of Bronze Age Metal Objects

June 20, 2014 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

What we call the ‘later prehistory’ in Britain and Ireland traditionally spans the first use of metal artefacts and thereafter the replacement of bronze technologies with iron, an overall period of approximately two and a half millennia which starts around 2500 BC and, by academic convention, is said to end with the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43 (which brings in the a series of hitherto…

3D Modelling via SfM

June 13, 2014 Authors: Andy Bevan

What is it and how can it be used? Archaeology was unusually quick to adopt 2D mapping (GIS) technologies at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, but now 3D approaches to recording everything from small artefacts to whole excavations and large landscapes are fast becoming popular. There are a variety of different methods involved, including both the use of laser scanners (sometimes known as LiDAR…

Crowd-sourcing

June 05, 2014 Authors: Daniel Pett

What do we mean by crowd-sourcing? Crowd-sourcing is a relatively new digital method for collecting information, services or funds from a large group of people, in small chunks, over the internet. This practice emerged less than a decade ago in the commercial sector, where companies had been exploring ways of out-sourcing labour to potentially interested people around the world. It is sometimes…

Online Transcription

June 05, 2014 Authors: Jennifer Wexler

How can it be useful? Letters, documents and literary works are useful for several different kinds of research into the human past. For example, transcribing old excavation records can make them more amenable to spatial and quantitative analysis, whilst transcribing historical documents from past literate societies can be compared and contrasted with the evidence from contemporary objects. Other…