00:00.00 archpodnet All right? Everybody welcome to the show Paul back in the states again for a brief period of time. 00:08.00 Paul Just very brief tomorrow morning. Um wow tomorrow afternoon I am flying out tomorrow morning I'm leaving the house so I'd better get packed real soon here and I'm going to spend another month plus in the Saudi Arabia again you know doing this weird kind of. 00:12.55 archpodnet M. 00:23.65 Paul Hybrid Pm Field director sort of job them doing looking forward to it. There's been a lot going on and trying to deal with some of the stuff remotely has been let's just say a challenge so it'll be good to actually be there in person and you know crack heads when I have to. 00:24.66 archpodnet Nice. 00:32.45 archpodnet Yeah, yeah I can imagine I can imagine. Yeah, it's never good trying to manage stuff remotely,, especially especially field work I mean that's just yeah I don't even know. How you would do that. That's that's ridiculous. So good on you for that one. 00:50.48 Paul Well my counterpart that's out there right now. She's been very good and she's been very diligent. It's just it's too much for 1 person so we have a standing meeting every day and we discuss the problems and I try to offer my perspective and some suggestions about how things can be dealt with and you know most of the issues we have are around staffing. 00:57.41 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 01:10.33 Paul But there's occasional stuff. You know we're working with engineering companies and um, you know you give them an inch. They take a mile and we have to you know set boundaries know when to put our foot down on things know when to escalate things to the the hires up in the company. You know that sort of stuff and. 01:10.52 archpodnet Um, yeah. 01:27.66 archpodnet Um, um. 01:28.54 Paul You know if we're there in person we can talk about this stuff in person. But as it is things take you know everything's got day delay before she can tell me and by then it's late in the day for her and it's first thing in the morning for me and so it's a. 01:29.99 archpodnet Yeah. 01:37.19 archpodnet Um, yeah. 01:41.70 Paul And it's a challenge. It's a fun challenge. But I'm I'm looking forward actually to getting back out there and dealing with things directly. 01:47.58 archpodnet I'm curious logistically if ah, you know since we talked archeology and stuff on this show I'm curious logistically are they cycling people back to the states just to kind of prevent burnout or did you were did you request that I'm just wondering if they're alternating. 02:00.65 Paul Um, I had to come back because of some family things. Um, and then also I had a a court date I didn't do anything bad. It was to resolve a problem with taxes that wasn't mine. Well it is my problem to fix but it wasn't mine that gotten that started it. So. 02:03.99 archpodnet Okay, oh yeah. 02:13.23 archpodnet That's. 02:17.75 Paul Ah, ah so that was yesterday and and oh and yesterday also happened to be my anniversary so you know things coincided nicely. 02:17.95 archpodnet Ah, oh man, Nice okay. 02:23.13 archpodnet You know it's nice to keep those things in check you know, make sure you're checking all the boxes there. Yep absolutely all right. 02:30.66 Paul But yeah, we do try to cycle people through because we yeah we want to build up a stock of really good people who know the area and know that the materials work well together and that means getting them out there for good long periods of time and then getting them back home so they can. 02:35.92 archpodnet Oh. Yeah. 02:47.64 Paul You know recover a little bit. 02:49.42 archpodnet Yeah, absolutely, that's good. It's good logistics to do that right? You don't you don't want people to burn out and just you know not have that especially being over in a foreign country like that. Yeah yeah, for sure all right? cool? Well um. 02:55.81 Paul No, we certainly don't want to burn through them. 03:05.79 archpodnet Let's talk about our topic today. So we're discussing a paper that we saw recently in advances in archaeological science. Ah our source for lots of things on this show and the papers by Sean field. It's called lidar derived road profiles a case study using Chaco roads. From the us southwest and both Paul and I were like this sounds real familiar. So I went and looked and episode one seventeen November Twenty Eighth Two thousand and nineteen we did a show called analyzing the chacoan road network and we interviewed Sean field the author of this study so that's. More work on this. You know, post pandemic and and pre pandemic last time so I don't know how his how his field work changed or if anything was had to be done differently. But it's pretty cool to see him continuing on this and continuing to publish on this topic. 03:56.50 Paul Yeah, and it's really a cool evolution of what he was working on before I mean it makes a lot of sense and what we know from I mean the article in and of itself makes a lot of sense but also in terms of what we know from his prior work it it grows from that and it explores new tech ways of dealing with ah. 03:57.54 archpodnet So. 04:13.15 Paul With mapping and understanding this road network and so that that just from kind of ah from a meta perspective was really kind of interesting to me just to to see the evolution. The the development of his own methodology and his own you know tech chops and everything is I would like to talk to him again about this. 04:14.23 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 04:27.76 archpodnet Um, yeah I mean hopefully we can get him on because it would be nice to have that followup because I'm I'm interested too and you know a lot of people only put together papers for the things that often for the things that worked you know what? I mean like what else has he tried. In order to analyze these roads that actually didn't work you know and and are there papers about that somewhere that maybe didn't make its essay advances and might be somewhere else or you know along those lines. So um, but regarding that you know talking about these road networks. It's actually pretty cool studying these because a lot of people have studied the Chaco And Road Networks. 04:48.87 Paul Um. 05:02.89 archpodnet In in the past and for anybody that doesn't know what we're talking about Chaco Canyon north western new mexico you know big cultural area had a really high point for about what 1000 years or something like that give or take where there was a lot of people there settlements all over the place pueblo Benito Big famous one that's down in the canyon. 05:17.17 Paul Um. 05:22.16 archpodnet If you ever have a chance to go there and see all that stuff. Oh my god it's just it looks like people lived there yesterday. it's crazy yeah um it's yeah it's really neat. It's really neat. Um, and as a side note, the Supernova Pictograph is there which was I really love that thing which was really cool because. 05:26.31 Paul That's phenomenal. 05:38.54 Paul I. 05:41.12 archpodnet It's got correlation with other networks I think ah I think it was written about in Greece definitely China and I think Egypt as well. This supernova that was visible during the daytime at at 1 point back in like it was around twelve hundred or eleven hundred or something like that if I remember write a d and it was ah. Noted by multiple societies including this pictograph that was put up on ah the underside of a rock ledge in Chaco Canyon which is super cool. So anyway, all that's really neat and he starts out just by saying kind of kind of why they're studying this stuff with. 06:05.21 Paul M. 06:14.82 archpodnet You know, understanding how people moved around this network with Choco Canyon kind of being the hub and moving to the outlying facilities and and not facilities. But I guess villages and settlements and and camps and how people use that to basically stay in touch and to trade and to have that interaction and it's it's. Interesting to understand the evolution of these roads and how they were constructed and and how they were used to facilitate this network. 06:40.27 Paul Yeah, and it's one of those things a lot of societies and this is part of the introduction. You know roadways are important components of it and so he talks about about roadways in elevated roadways in South America he talks about about the roman roads I mean Roman Roads is a thing that we all know. About as a term. It's an idea even if we don't know any of the details. Um, and and it's one of those the existence of them is one of the the kind of cool cross-cultural anthropological things about humans that that you can compare from one society to another and then like so many other things you. 06:59.64 archpodnet Ah. 07:18.68 Paul Religion cuisine. Whatever ah architecture go on down the list. There are different takes on different ways that things are made different ways that things are done different reasons different underlined reasons and different proximal reasons of why people make their roads in the places they make them and. 07:21.35 archpodnet Um. 07:37.11 archpodnet Oh. 07:37.42 Paul In the ways that they make them and and so he starts analyzing that trying to get at a little bit of sense of what the? um, what makes this road network uniquely chock 1 07:48.99 archpodnet What? What really interests me about that as well is you know, just I guess it's really visible in places like Nevada right? where you've got some ah some trail that's listed on a map from like the 20 s that's now interstate eighty or something like that. You know what I mean. Um, how some of these old roads that that may have started out as you know, initially used by native americans for sure to to transit. You know, common pathways like maybe there's a river in the way or there's a path so everybody's going to kind of take the same path in that case and it's a path of least resistance so to speak so it makes sense to have a road there. It's really interesting to me that most of the stuff in and out of Chaco has just never been developed because nobody ever moved to Chaco Canyon after this the the only people that moved there was the national park service. So it's ah it's interesting to so it would be interesting to see or would have been interesting to see how that would have developed. 08:29.12 Paul M. 08:41.38 archpodnet You know these all would have been destroyed and would people would people have been using the same network of roads because like I said in Nevada there's um, what is it? Well, there's I 40 down there and I know like the ah route 66 not in Nevada and either those in Nevada but in Nevada you've got interstate highway 50 and you see the new road but then in some cases on corners. You can see like the pavement from the old road you know out all broken up on so the side of a hillside or something when it was a 2 lane little road that you know just kind of followed the hills and that's. 09:03.36 Paul Me. 09:10.51 Paul Yeah. 09:12.72 archpodnet I Mean that's along the same lines of what we're talking about somebody's going to analyze that later on and discuss what these you know how important these roads were and how they were maintained in order to keep them. Um, keep them useful. 09:24.57 Paul You know the part of ah New York where I live here. Um, you know in an hour north of of New York city we have tons of roads like that like route 22 is just a couple miles away from me. But if I drive up route 22 it gets intersected in a bunch of places by old route 22 09:38.28 archpodnet Right. 09:39.69 Paul Yeah, so along the way as car travel became more important they went from this meandering sort of ah you know Horse path to ah to you know a bigger roadway that was straighter and for whatever reasons followed. Ah, ah what was considered a better line. 09:49.12 archpodnet Ah. 09:57.63 Paul Ah, but you see that you see the evolution of these things through time and it's really easy to if you just you know then you're in a place like where I am and you just look out and there it is you know on the roadsides. 09:58.51 archpodnet Ah. 10:05.20 archpodnet Yeah, yeah I know it seems like the evolution of the modern road is generally straighter and whiter and that's about it but just makes me wonder if you know, kind of getting off the rails a little bit here as we. Get into an era of potentially self-driving cars I mean those are coming down the line whether you want them or not so you know self-driving cars and just a different way of using the roads rather than relying on people relying on software to kind of manage this. We'll be able to have a different style of road system and it makes me wonder if. You know they'll continue to be. They wouldn't need to be as wide I'd imagine so we could probably have narrower roads in the future just because they'll be more efficiently used by computers rather than people trying to jam in and don't know how to use the zipper method to merge onto an interstate self-driving cars know how to do that. So I'm thinking traffic will be a thing of the past but it would be interesting to see what our connection to roads would be because you know more likely we'll be inside of a car with the windows all opaque and we'll just be playing video games reading you know having a meeting doing whatever we're doing but not driving and it'll be interesting to see that. But anyway. 11:13.29 Paul You're not driving right now. Are you. 11:13.51 archpodnet That's I'm currently not driving but I'm in my car which is also my home. Ah right right? So exactly exactly all right? Let's take a short break and then come back and and see how Sean used lidar to. 11:21.97 Paul Ah, just checking. 11:30.24 archpodnet Study these roads in a way that really hadn't been much done much in the past back in a minute all right now I'm just going to leave that as it is take a drink of water or something oh my god if I didn't have to drive 3 hours immediately following this? um. 11:40.62 Paul Um, or something. 11:50.80 archpodnet Then I would yeah I got to go down and borrow my Grandma's car so we can use it while our while the jeep over the weekend is getting set up for flatow. Luckily my grandma lives nearby and she's not really driving right now. So but she's an hour so that'll be fun. All right, let's get back into it. 11:50.14 Paul Um, ah. 12:09.87 archpodnet But are we at 12 minutes okay welcome back to the arche podcast episode two zero eight and we're talking about Sean Fields article in advances in archaeological practice. It's ah available. Go check it out. We're linking to it here in the show notes. So lidar derived road profiles. And really, we do mean profiles. Um, you know something looking at it from the side. You know a profile because he mentions lots of people have used lidar to find roads because roads typically will have either a depression and or some sort of burm or something that you can see that are often in straight lines that nature is. 12:32.81 Paul Um, yeah. 12:37.48 Paul This. 12:46.98 archpodnet Has a really hard time making so when you're looking at a surface lidar is relatively easy to use as long as you don't have like a ton of things obstructing it like different vegetation that lidar perhaps can't see through although lighter is notoriously good at seeing through vegetation. So yeah, um, yeah, what do you think? what do you think. 12:59.48 Paul Yeah, yeah, well what I think is that that that really resonated with me I mentioned on this show a couple years ago how we were working on a project near the the Hudson River and we were. We knew that there were roadways there. 13:14.58 archpodnet Um, yeah. 13:18.91 Paul But they were really hard to find and then I found one meter dem of ah of that area light our dem and you know I looked at it and didn't see much because I was doing the regular gray scale because I don't like hill shades and then just for you know for giggles I put it in a hill shade and boom. All these roads popped up some of the ah the mappedopended structures that we were looking at the foundations of were clears day in that you know and in relation to the roads and all this stuff just just popped so he does talk about the um about the use of hill shade as 1 method that people have used and so he's. 13:38.99 archpodnet Ah, nice. Yeah. 13:56.00 archpodnet Um. 13:56.34 Paul Testing out another one but it's also the same kind of a dataset being lidar based. But yeah so I have that that kind of not rigorous very you know one-off sort of accidental use of lidar to find roads and and it's neat to see what somebody does with a rigorous methodological. 14:13.63 archpodnet Yeah, for sure I don't remember reading in this because I mean I read it like a month ago when we were going to talk about it and then skimmed it over again today. He didn't collect. This is readily available lidar data. He got here right? This was already collected. He didn't collect this lidar data from somewhere else I don't remember do you remember that. 14:13.65 Paul Approach to this. 14:25.98 Paul Yeah I was some I was skimming too because I I had the same question just before we came on air and I didn't see where it came from. But I think that if it if it had been. You know. 14:32.79 archpodnet So yeah. 14:41.28 Paul Custom gathered for this then it would have been mentioned a little more prominently. 14:45.80 archpodnet Yeah, probably although that wasn't really the focus of the article. It's just about using the lidar. So I guess there's that yeah um, yeah, indeed and the study area too is really massive. It literally is the entire corner of northwest. 14:47.35 Paul No, it really wasn't it was what you do with the lidar data. Not the fact of the lidar data. 15:00.79 archpodnet Mexico. Well that the whole corner but a large portion of a corner of Northwest New Mexico and because these chacoan roads on figure 1 in the article if you're following along really shows how far out these networks really extend and then where um, you know where things are in relation to all that and then that's matched up with a. With a lidar image of a road that just pops clearly like somebody laid a stick in the sand or something like that on a beach I mean that's what the road looks like but it's massive. So yeah, um, well I just totally lost my train I thought yeah but. 15:23.46 Paul Yeah. 15:35.29 Paul So basically what he does is he's taking the um in the studies taking various segments of these roads things that had been previously known. He's not using it to identify rhodes. Not at this point ah people have definitely done that and done that successfully. But that's not the interest of the article. 15:44.50 archpodnet Oh. 15:50.62 archpodnet Right. 15:51.77 Paul Which I thought was an interesting take. It's really at at characterizing the roads. Ah so he's taking known ground truth segments of roads and and then generating these profiles programmatically in REvery half meter along I mean to the point that. 16:04.13 archpodnet Oh. 16:09.75 Paul They've got about 84000 different transect profiles generated with this program. Um, which is wow that's a lot of data and then and the the ah the code for the program is up on Github and that's fantastic I love when people do that? um. 16:13.74 archpodnet Yeah, yeah, yeah. 16:25.85 archpodnet Ah. 16:28.14 Paul So you know that that that makes you pleased. Um, but then the the crux of the article really is what's done with those profiles How that the data are massaged in order to try to compare one set against another. 16:37.83 archpodnet Ah. 16:40.81 archpodnet How familiar are you with our just out of curiosity. 16:47.74 Paul Yeah, so I've mentioned before I'm not a fan of our I Totally get why people are no pun intended but I'll stick it and um I I Totally get why some people are but it just doesn't make sense to me. 16:53.23 archpodnet Um. 16:56.81 archpodnet Nice. Yeah, yeah. 17:03.22 Paul And so I think I compared it it once on here with ah with using left-handed scissors I'm very right-handed and if I try to use left-handed scissors I either screw up because I'm using my left hand which isn't very good or I try to use them with my right hand and then the angle is all wrong and I don't you know so it's it's. 17:08.98 archpodnet Yeah. 17:21.40 archpodnet Doesn't work. Yeah, okay. 17:22.88 Paul That's what R is like for me again I Really get why some people love it and I've seen fantastic work that people have done with it and um, it's one of those tools that you know if if you're good at if it resonates with you. There's fantastic work. That's being done with it. So um, you know more power to everybody who can. 17:38.36 archpodnet Yeah I really only ask because I really don't know a whole lot about it other than what we talk about people using it for in some of the stuff that we talk about right? I've never used r myself never really studied it that much. Um I actually did a workshop in r one time at a. Conference. It was so long ago I didn't remember it so that's pretty much useless at this point but the fact that they used r or that Sean used r to essentially slice up these these this model into these nearly eighty four thousand transects wasn't really something I had thought. That r was used for right? I thought it was more of ah, almost more of a statistical thing rather than ah, a tool like that right? yeah. 18:21.66 Paul Yeah, the first time I saw r being used for spatial processing. It was in a lecture a bunch of years ago now by Sebastian Heath who's also been on this. He's a professor at New York's institute for the study of the ancient world and I thought that is madness. 18:32.52 archpodnet Um, yeah. 18:40.36 Paul And I really dig it. You know you're using it first. But it's since then it's become a very legitimate spatial analysis tool again one that I don't use I gravitate more towards python for things but it's totally legit and a lot of people use it to great effect. 18:46.25 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 18:52.30 archpodnet Um, yeah. 18:57.20 archpodnet Well one of the things that he was doing with this with these with these transects anyway, really just cross sections of these roads in in lots and lots of different little places and it's really only what am I looking at here like 10 roads 8 roads something like that and. All of them had certain number of segments to the roads because maybe they weren't totally contiguous but they could tell you know where they were here and then they had the length of the segments. The longest 1 looks like it was about Eleven kilometers give or take and that one had 23000 transect lines so they were really He's really taking a look at this. But here's the thing. He's using the lidar- derivd data to basically take what's visible on the surface about this road and there's no backhos here that are cutting a transect across these roads or anything like that to really look at the stratigraphy of previous road construction events or if that's even visible with these. Really is ah a surface level literally a surface level analysis of the shapes of these roads and the interesting thing about that that I thought was he's using that to compare those profiles and what we know about the profile with ground truth roads so ones that either he's seen or somebody else has by the way he's got data for it and saying does this. 19:55.68 Paul Oh. 20:09.70 archpodnet What does this tell us about the ground truth road that you know we can say as a control and then and then looking at the non-ground truth roads the ones that maybe nobody or maybe just him hasn't visited and saying okay so what can we infer about this based on the profiles that we have and what we know about the ground truth roads. It's It's a really cool way to do it without. I Mean honestly with minimizing your field work which is expensive and you know but getting some really valuable data done as well and and doing this so it's it's pretty cool the way he did that you know. 20:42.26 Paul Yeah, it seems that there's a lot of work going on now between remote sensing of various kinds and ground truthing. Um I can't talk about it much. But 1 of the projects I worked on last year involved doing a lot of pedestrian survey to verify sites that were identified with machine learning. 20:52.22 archpodnet Ah. 20:57.57 Paul Right? And we found that it was really strikingly accurate at finding finding sites. Um the sizes and the shapes of the sites weren't always the same once we got on them ah versus what the? ah the computer had picked out but the locations of them was. 20:57.66 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 21:15.27 Paul Was really really good and then I'm also we just go ahead. 21:16.70 archpodnet Um, yeah, was that no what was I'm really curious about that was that done. Um, how should I say it. 21:27.97 archpodnet Was it done like with a predictive modeling was it looking for where it thinks sites should be or was it fed information regarding like land size shapes and things like that like lidar models and stuff like that. How did it? What did it use to find the sites. 21:41.66 Paul Um I wasn't involved in any way shape or form on that side of it. So I can't tell you what the inputs were I would guess that knowing the people who are doing it was everything they could get including some other survey work that we had done so they had known targets of various kinds of sites. 21:46.79 archpodnet Okay. 21:54.56 archpodnet Gotcha. Okay. 21:58.57 Paul They had known you know geological maps They had slope and aspect and all that sort of stuff and I think they just fed everything they could at the at the computer models and started getting out areas of high probability and then those ones of highest probability. Um, we had archaeologists looking at them. 22:02.36 archpodnet Ah. 22:09.42 archpodnet Um, yeah. 22:18.37 Paul In in satellite aerial photos and saying yes or no and then the ones that got the yes those are the ones we want to go look at. 22:24.54 archpodnet Right? Okay, well, that's really cool What we're gonna say before I interrupted you on that. 22:30.40 Paul Yeah now no and I was also going to say you know about ground truthing um a little bit of a bride here but we've got an article that just came out in Journal of anthropological archeology I'm a co-author on and it is specifically about ground truthing. 22:39.80 archpodnet Me. 22:46.14 Paul Because it's a response to another article that came out last year made a lot of buzz because it talks about it tries to basically argue for a very different configuration of sumerian cities and it's typically envisioned but that article is based entirely on remote sense data and. 22:57.65 archpodnet Um, yeah. 23:03.99 Paul Our contention is that it wasn't done right because it doesn't match what we find in excavation and in the coreing that we're doing on that site. So yeah I you know you and I both love remote data. You know I do a lot of it. 23:15.36 archpodnet Yeah. 23:19.72 Paul But I also also love ground truthing things and I know that these 2 things have to work in concert. 23:24.95 archpodnet I mean it has to be done right? The the more that we ground truth this remote data I mean the more accurate it becomes the more the more we're able to you know, really do some good predictions I Keep thinking back, especially with this whole with this lidar survey here. It's really got me thinking and you talking about. 23:32.44 Paul 4 23:44.20 archpodnet You know finding sites last year based on um based on machine learning. You know when we first started doing this podcast together I was I was still kind of fresh off ah by a few years that China Lake survey that I did where I really was starting to think about you know doing high-resolution drone. Imagery if not photogrammetry but maybe even just high resolution video and then you know getting 100 % survey coverage with that kind of machine because there's virtually no vegetation out there. No trees nothing for the drone to run into so you could really easily map out an area for it to look at and then have and then have originally. I was you know I was always thinking people actually just look at this looking for obvious things and then circling those and then archaeologists go out and ground truth them but the obvious answer is There's so many sensors you can put on a drone these days I mean you can put lidar on a drone you can put um yeah other types of imagery on a drone and then you know. Take all this information in and man you almost don't even need to be there. You just tell the drone go out here. Do this feed that to the computer and then have the computer send that to me at Starbucks because that's where I'll be and I'll go out and ground truth it. That's about what we're getting to. 24:53.26 Paul Ah, yeah, we're not quite there yet. But it's it is going in that direction. Definitely um I think that there's still a lot of ah work to be done on both ends of it and um and I know you're a bigger fan of Ai than I am. 24:56.91 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 25:07.12 Paul But you know one of the things that you keep on I've heard you say a lot about Ai is how you know it feeds its outputs back in its inputs to get better. Um, people are also really good at that too at feeding data into things to get better models and so you know I don't think it's an either or basically I don't think 1 thing is ever going to replace the other. 25:13.29 archpodnet Yeah, yeah, well. 25:25.34 archpodnet Yeah. 25:27.50 Paul Ah, but I think that in concert the the ai the machine learning the the ground truthing the remote sensing all working together are going to get us in a very interesting place. Ah do I Want to talk about this article some more. 25:36.10 archpodnet Um, yeah, hey we probably should yeah let's do that. Actually let's ah, let's just take our final break and then we'll come back and talk about this. Um, we don't have an ad for this but we have been starting to get some. Some good traction for whatever reason I don't know I haven't do anything special but apodnett.com/members. Go check out that on the website because our last culturo share event will be up there shortly probably tomorrow. Well it'll already be up there by the time you're hearing this I'm not thinking fourth dimensionally? Um, anyway, the ah it's my favorite quote from. Back to the future. Anyway, um, so we'll already be up but members get access to those in the past and we had a great one this last Sunday as we're recording this on Underwater Archeology so it was a really fascinating discussion so members can check that out if you're not a member arpodnett.com/members. We'll be back in a minute all right. I got to say I'm a little checked out on this article I mean it's it's some stuff. It's cool but I like going off on the tangents a little bit too because it's keeping me more engaged I want to just talk to shot about this honestly. Yeah yeah. 26:46.77 Paul Um, I you know I think it's fine. Yeah no I I think that that's actually I always feel a little bad when we're talking about an article and we haven't gotten the ah author on you know to to advocate for themselves. You know? um. 26:57.88 archpodnet Ah, yeah for sure. 27:02.65 Paul I'd rather go off on tangits in a lot of ways just hey this makes me think of something else. 27:03.56 archpodnet Yeah, with the article like what I mean and that's kind of the point of it right? Let the article Spark the conversation I like that So all right, all right? Let's jump back in. 27:11.29 Paul Exactly. 27:19.77 archpodnet Welcome back to the archeitech podcast final segment of episode two zero Eight check out the article in the show notes if you haven't done so already because we're referring to lots of things in there. But yeah, getting back to the article 1 of the things I thought was really cool and a very smart thing to do was he took Sean took these. Transects that he created these profiles off those transects and amplified the topography because that's what the lidar is producing right? It's a topographic map essentially produced by lidar and he's amplifying this to really see that because some of the changes and some of the variation. The subtle variations in these could be extremely subtle. Until you really jack it up I do that in audio editing all the time sometimes if I'm having a trouble finding something because somebody's too quiet I'll just take that segment and Jack up the amplitude on it so I can really see what's going on there delete what I need to and then bring it back down and it's an easy way to to find small things. So. 27:57.30 Paul It. 28:12.85 archpodnet Ah, really that really resonated with me. 28:13.12 Paul Yeah, and that's something that you'll often do with topographic imagery like ah like hill shades. You know you'll you'll make it so you know one meter in the vertical is now is represented as three meters or something so that you you really get the texture and you get the differences that you otherwise you wouldn't you wouldn't see. Um. Just because the earth is a little flatter than once you get up high enough than you might expect not everywhere but lots of places and so they have to do that I think with this particular technique. The problem with that is you can introduce a lot of noise so he has a secondary part of how he smooths out the noise and that's ingenious. Um. 28:36.17 archpodnet Um, yeah. 28:43.45 archpodnet Right. 28:49.90 Paul He's smoothing out the noise both on any individual profile. You know so instead of having it be jaggy and a little lower and then jaggy up high it smooths it out into a nice normalized curve the night s flatp bottom and then normalize between 1 and the next one and averaging those so that you end up with ah with a. 29:07.14 archpodnet Um. 29:09.46 Paul Very idealized but generated from real data ah profile of where that that roadway is and what it actually looks like what its cross section or its idealized cross section is and along with that I mean that might not make sense. But I've got to highlight the figure 3 in this article. 29:20.94 archpodnet Ah. 29:26.55 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 29:28.16 Paul Is absolutely beautiful because it conveys exactly what they're doing with that so succinctly and so attractively just if nothing else just go take a look at the article for that because I think that is is an Edward Tufty worthy 29:33.74 archpodnet So yeah, no. 29:43.58 Paul Ah, illustration of how to do a map and how to do a diagram. 29:47.80 archpodnet Nice, Yeah, it's fantastic. In fact, I was sitting on that and was going to mention it when you brought that up because it is fantastic. Yeah, um, it's really cool and it's interesting too because we're not doing this just to make fancy graphs and Maps. He's trying to figure out you know some information about these.. What are these? What is it all mean right? so. Um, one of the things he mentions in the article is that his longitudinal profiles show how the road grade was modified in relationship to the nearby Terrain. So How it's you know, changed and and and really constructed in response to the nearby terrain. Um, and then the transverse profiles or cross sections help obviously Reveal. Um. 30:17.85 Paul M. 30:23.79 archpodnet Depth shape and character of the roadbed which I also thought was really interesting because you know it's interesting through time as you look at those how people use roads are they walking in single file are they walking side by side is it a wide road because they're carrying lots of things or maybe even have some sort of I don't know if they don't think they had carts or anything like that they carried stuff on their heads I don't know. Um. 30:41.25 Paul They didn't have wheels or they didn't use wheels. 30:42.84 archpodnet But they didn't have wheels. They really didn't yeah exactly exactly they didn't construct wheels. Let's just put it that way. Um, but and and if they had they'd be very different roads like if you did this on you know, a lot of early Roman Roads at least ones they didn't pave or or put flagstones down or something like that in some way. Even those though they have ruts in them that are you know predictable based on the things that were that were rolling over them. So yeah, really interesting and this this research can be used to um I guess expand into other areas like that and and really is a foundation for that. So. 31:03.63 Paul Yeah. 31:19.70 archpodnet All right? Ah yeah, just going down the notes here I'll cut all this out. Yeah yeah, me too me too All right. 31:26.36 Paul I'm just scanning my notes here are her shared notes. Ah. 31:44.46 Paul Yeah, your comment about how the roads were used and how people traversed them is actually part of the previous article that we interviewed them on here talking about moving logs and you know how people would have carried these things because you know you could carry a log. 31:44.74 archpodnet So. 31:54.64 archpodnet Ah. 32:02.27 Paul Side by side you carry a single file you could have you know a couple people or you could have multiple people you can drag it all this stuff goes into questions of how he's looking at how these roadways were used and and this is yet then I guess another data set to help ah to help understand that you know you can. 32:05.80 archpodnet Ah. 32:21.10 Paul It came up a little bit in our last interview two weeks ago but trying to get at not just the the tech of it for its own sake and not just the numbers of things for their own sake but also to try to get an understanding of how people did what they did even the mundane tasks. 32:22.18 archpodnet But. 32:38.31 archpodnet Um, yeah. 32:38.90 Paul Moving a load of goods from 1 place to another making. Ah, ah you know a Lithic tool ah stuff that probably wouldn't have been recorded in any way. Even if you have writing um but does tell you things about how people in the past lived. 32:51.60 archpodnet Yeah. 32:58.81 Paul And so it's it's interesting just to try to to try to suss it out. 33:04.31 archpodnet Yeah, something along those lines too that he mentions you know some people look at the stuff that archaeologists study and and other sciences like this and they're going. Okay, that's cool. But why why do we care right? It's ah it's a stupid road that you went from 1 place to the next who cares about a road right? We care about the things at the end of the roads. 33:17.12 Paul Um. 33:22.10 archpodnet But 1 thing he I think cleverly mentions is you know the understanding how the road was constructed and its morphology and how that matches with um, you know some of the other roads around there really tells you a lot about the culture that was there right? because is it ah is it a single line path that was just well- worn through time where. 33:38.10 Paul Um. 33:41.96 archpodnet You know people were going from 1 place to the next and that's just kind of haphazardly made almost like game trails because it's a path of least resistance between 2 places or did it start that way and then turned into something that was more constructed which nobody's just going to widen and make and improve a road like just because they want to that's going to take some sort of. 33:45.89 Paul I. 34:01.30 archpodnet You know, political or cultural will or even religious will in order to make this thing that's for the good of the people that's going to help everybody again. People don't just go out and do that they're usually told to do that and brought together by a person or a unifying body or a concept and knowing how these roads were constructed can help. Start to get to some of those meetings which I thought was really cool. 34:21.30 Paul Yeah, and especially when you do have it in a complex society. You oftentimes will get other things like who can use the road I don't know that that's been suggested in terms of these roads but that that is a legitimate question that you could ask of roadways anywhere you know is this a private is this a toll road is this a private road of some kind. 34:28.33 archpodnet Um, yeah. 34:35.14 archpodnet M. 34:40.57 Paul Is this something that anybody can can access or is it just for cultural or political or religious or whatever elites to use yeah or inversely it's it's considered too gross for them and it's only for the lowest castes or whatever you know that there lots of ah lots of. 34:48.14 archpodnet Um, yeah I. 34:55.97 archpodnet Yeah. 35:00.44 Paul Ways that you can slice and dice How you want to analyze these and and try to get a better understanding through yeah like you said you know people are you know we tend to focus on what's on the end of the roads. But the roads themselves hold a lot of information themselves. 35:06.41 archpodnet Yeah. 35:14.35 archpodnet I'll tell you what there's some interesting carpool lanes here in the Seattle area going up 4 ah 5 and and up I 5 mostly 4 or 5 though I'm thinking. Yeah, no listen to this. It's crazy because they've they've done a really interesting thing that I haven't seen anywhere else in the country and I've been in a lot of places they've. 35:20.72 Paul Carpool lanes. 35:30.16 archpodnet Made the carpool lanes a toll lane and they're calling it ah a carpool lane express lane. So if you've got 2 or more people you can use it. Yeah, if you got 2 or more people use it. You can use it for free if you want to pay seventy five cents to a dollar 25 and you're only 1 person then you can also use it right? and. 35:34.16 Paul Express lane. 35:42.29 Paul Yeah. 35:46.77 archpodnet You're sitting in traffic and you're just looking over there going man those people they suck until you get over there then you feel like the elite you feel like I'm in it Now. Let's see a suckers So anyway, but you're totally right? Yeah what if somebody's going to go through the trouble of. Building and constructing and maintaining a road. You know there's a darn good chance that they're going to go and limit who can use that sometimes and and maybe they didn't though maybe it was made for everybody but you know you want some recognition for that effort. A lot of times whether that's again through political or or religious I Guess ah. 36:13.54 Paul Um. 36:24.59 archpodnet You know some sort of gains that way or or something else who knows but just studying the construction of these and and really getting into it tells you a lot more than you would think you would know um you know from just from not knowing because everybody studies the settlements out there. Pub Bonito's been studied to you know the last centimeter of of rock there. 36:42.58 Paul M. 36:43.35 archpodnet And and all the other little you know, chocolate and settlements within Chocolate Canyon and then the chocolateco and outliers that are at the ends of these roads and along the roads. But yeah, how much how much work has been done in between them to know the significance between different things. You know if it's a really nice, good. Well-maintained road. Maybe that. Imbues a lot of significance religious or otherwise between those 2 endpoints. You know what? I mean so all right. 37:07.63 Paul Well before we wrap up 1 last thing I'd like to comment about this um is that a couple years ago when we talk about lidar. It was about the lidar itself is really wiz ba cool we can use it to find sites. 37:26.24 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 37:27.17 Paul We can use it to find features. We can use it to find different things and it was It was all about finding and here it's not this article. It's not about the finding it's it's taken it one step further. It's like okay so this is yet another data set that we have what can we do with that. Not just find the sites not just find the roads not just find the things. But. 37:40.66 archpodnet Yeah. 37:45.36 Paul How can we try to tease out additional knowledge from that and so again like I said this article is the evolution of his of his previous one and the toolset is evolving as we're discussing it here on the podcast. 37:49.63 archpodnet Um I love it. That's. 38:00.50 archpodnet Nice, nice. Well we I'd love to try to get Sean on Sean if you happen to be listening to this you contact Paul or I you can get a hold of me and Chris at archaeologyponetwork.com all our contact info is on the website if anybody knows Sean wants to get a hold of him I'll probably try to send him an email. I just been so busy just didn't have a chance to really reach out but that doesn't mean we can't come on and talk about some of the other stuff that either didn't make it to the article or really kind of flesh out some of this information so any other thoughts on this Paul before we close out. 38:36.33 Paul Ah, no I've got a whining dog under my desk here who really needs to go to the bathroom. So maybe we should close this out. 38:40.62 archpodnet Ah, nice, nice all right? Well with that. We'll see you guys in two weeks I don't know what we're going to talk about Paul's in Saudi Arabia he may or may not be here but I'll figure something out so in I hear you I hear you all right? Thanks everybody. 38:52.36 Paul I'm going to try I'm going to Try. All right take care bye. 38:58.86 archpodnet All right? So give me just a second here I'm going to record the intro because I don't want to stop the recording you pull this over here. Hello and welcome to the arche tech podcast episode 208 I'm your host Chris Webster with my co-host Paul Zimmerman 39:01.86 Paul The okay. 39:16.94 archpodnet Today we talk about using lidar to analyze prehistoric roads. Let's get to it nice all right.