Last night I made it to a seminar given by Dr Giasemi Vavoula of the University of Leicester’s Museum studies department .She gave a very thought provoking overview of mobile applications in museums and a whole raft of potential archaeological versions presented themselves.

First she introduced us to the whole are of TEL – Technologically enhanced learning with some references to useful reports

Then she went through some useful case studies:

The Tate multimedia guides

The Bletchly Park Text service where visitors can select items of  interest by sending a text message and relevant information is available on  a personalised website when they get home.

The American Museum of Natural History Explorer App

And there were some nice augmented reality dinosaurs via the Royal Ontario museum

The Build the Truce project at the Imperial war Museum

Leafsnap which enables you to take a picture of a leaf and the tree will be identified

Museum of London street map app.

There was a nice app shown produced by the Stedelijk for a festival where visitors could scan the QR code for one of the Stadelijk’s holdings and then hang it anywhere in the festival venue, and it was visible via augmented reality.

The seminar ended with a quick visit to the literature around learning, understanding how people learn with reference to Piaget, Vygotsky amongst others where the importance of understanding how people use display space now is important for understanding .

I don’t have time to do justice to all the aspects of the talk, but just really to put up the links. Some immediate applications to the archaeology I am interested in come to mind: Pot snap to take a picture of a profile and some possible identities are suggested (although there would be a big back room job of producing a searchable database of shapes as well as fabrics.

One possible APP which occurs to me is to have AR plans with links to online grey literature of  developer funded archaeology. Time to dust off my coding books!

This on Medieval new towns

http://awhitinghistory.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/who-created-the-medieval-new-towns/

would be fun to compare with the development of Roman towns

This on the Roman Urban mind

http://historyoftheancientworld.com/2013/02/the-fall-and-decline-of-the-roman-urban-mind/

rather western centric for my usual tastes but sesm to link up with waht we have been trying to do with Ceramascene approach

This on the culture of bathing in Roman Palestine

http://historyoftheancientworld.com/2013/02/from-rejection-to-incorporation-the-roman-bathing-culture-in-palestine/

and this fun piece on a well travelled Roman Brick

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/1-kitty-2-empires-2-000-years-world-history-told-through-a-brick/273320/

My copies of the thesis publication, just before I have to post them all out again!

This looks like a useful post , relevent to communicating archaeologyhttp://www.dontgetcaught.biz/2013/02/7-ineffective-habits-of-scientists-who.html
 

A few recent jobs have me looking at some very modern bricks ( well 19th century.) The stamps alone are hinting at a very interesting story about the development of brick makers in the 19th century - there are lots of small businesses, shome over the course of time are often partnered by their offspring, along with other brick makers. Some brick-makers have fingers in other peoples pies. There are also fluctuations of ownership of the clay fields and brick works. The quite staggering range of different brick makers commissioned to supply bricks for a single building is quite striking. Then at the turn of the 19th / 20th century there appears to be a major consolidation into a few 
The whole setup to my mind makes a nice parallel with how commercial archaeology currently runs, with lots of ultra small companies competing and undercutting each other.Perhaps we can expect the emergence of a few dominant providers in the next few years?
There are a number of useful resources I will peg here in case I get the time to follow this through.in addition to product catalogues
Some Brick stamps
 Information about the coal mines of Durham
and some archives

Available through Archaeopress



 

I was asked to produce some form of statistical weight for my comments last week on roof colour. So I have gone back to my Beirut data to try to provide some evidence. I have taken the opportunity to update the pottery ceramic phasing dates. I have also excluded the material from the Umayyad and later periods

Summarises the Beirut data by phase – with  fabric sorted by colour. I have used the same phase groupings as y thesis rather than the much larger range of ceramic phases that paul Reynolds has given the pottery dates, otherwise we would be here all night.

 The highest levels of yellow tile occur in the Late Hellenistic (22%) and the Byzantine, and post earthquake phases (25% and 27% )  - so I will take this as some support for my theory that yellow is more important n those periods. I think a more detailed analysis of the material in the Roman phases would also help recognise any intrusive and residual elements.

I haven’t the time to do a detailed spatial analysis by phase – I will leave that as an exercise for later – but a simple breakdown is by site:

This table 

Shows the roof tile colours for the Hellenistic phases – There  really isn’t enough material from the Seleucid period to  analyse this way – but where we have largish samples BEY045 – the bathhouse – is higher than the other sites.

The picture is a lot less cleat. There is a high level of yellow roof tile in the early Roman phase – which we can I think pretty safely assume is residual material from the demolition of the Hellenistic public  on that site and its incorporation into the bathhouse. The presence of yellow tile is higher at BEY045 in the next two Roma phases, but not by much, and could still be accounted for by residual material.

Shows us the level of yellow tile in the Byzantine phases . This shows a much higher  level of yellow roof tile in these phases, but not so high in the bathhouse – but very high in BEY006 – where the colonnaded street had been picked out in yellow  - although it should be noted that yellow tile is  present at 28% in the Medieval period at BEY045, compared to 15% at BEY006 suggesting that the Yellow was the defining roof colour of the bathhouse in its final phase.

So some proof that colour is important in the Hellenistic and Byzantine period in Beirut and yellow correlates with public buildings. I will try to drill a bit deeper with the data to look at some specific areas at a later date.

One of the first things that I noticd when I started cataloguing CBM, all those years ago in Beirut, was that they come in different colours. Much of this is is down to the natural colour of the fired clay from a particular region – for Instance Paul Reynolds made the point when we were preparing my thesis for publication that the cilician clays tend to be pale when fired. The implication is that not only are most of the yellow tile in Beirut subject to some vigorous processing, but the really red tile were as well and  I will need to look at my dataset again when I have the time to see if I can pick up any pattern for the really red one ( which got subsumed into the general pink to red category, but the original data is still there for interrogation)

Most reconstructions I have seen tend to show red roof tile. However there is a whole range of colour generally cover by the term ‘buff’  which basically goes from pale red to yellow. There are quite a few which seem to hover around the border, and it can depend on how wet a  tile is (and the ambient light in which you were working) whether you can categorise it as red or yellow ( or something in between ). Coding by Munsell can only take you so far – at some point you have to make a decision about how to group fabrics if you are doing a higher level analysis.

In Beirut I just used the two colours red and yellow (I would introduce a pale category if I was repeating the exercise) – mainly because one of the field specialists ( Tony) mentioned that he had noted a set of yellow tegulae with red imbrex from a dump deposit – hinting at a ‘nice’’ raspberry ripple’ pattern. So that was the original framing of what I was looking for in terms of colour. I never did find solid evidence of the raspberry ripple roof,  but it did become clear that there was pattern in the basic colour difference – in the Hellenistic deposits and the Byzantine deposits the yellow roof tile correlated strongly with public buildings ( Gymnasium, bathhouses, colonnaded streets etc) whilst in the Roman period there was no real differentiation.. Some of this may be down to the clay used by various suppliers, but given the similarity in the fabric s apart from the colours I think that there is a deliberate choice about colour going on by the ancient builders and architects.

So now I try to split into slightly more colour categories, but not to many to making analysis impossible(!) and am trying to correlate with the use of external patterns on imbrex – something I also touched on in my thesis . One aspect of the ancient city in the East that does interest me is how much activity there would have been ( especially in the summer) during dawn and dusk ( when different textures of roof would have been most visible) compared to midday – when its too hot to be outside. And of course this leads me back to one of my perennial favourites – about reconstructing the roof scape of the past and perhaps the legibility of a city and understanding some of the social constraints  echoed in the architecture of a particular time.