00:00.00 archpodnet Hi everybody welcome to the podcast paul welcome back to the states. Ah good. Good yeah, we're down in down in kabo san Lucas Mexico again where we were a few months ago except ah an airbnb this time just kind of hanging out sort of somewhat local style I guess. 00:03.60 Paul Why thank you? How you doing. Ah. 00:17.93 Paul Um, good weather, nice and sunny. 00:19.52 archpodnet Ah, better than a resort anyway. So yeah, yeah, it's nice. Nice down here I looked at the weather and it was like 75 to 76 literally every day that we're here for the high and it was just perfect and like zero fluctuation. So. It's ah it's nice, but it's always like that down here. That's one of the reasons why we like it. You know it gets hot and humid in the August september timeframe and the rains come but aside from that it's pretty much the same weather all year round and it's just great. So we're here for two weeks total yeah um last half of April altogether. So. 00:48.42 Paul Um, nice, how long are you gonna be there A wow. 00:57.70 archpodnet Yeah, we got like basically free plane tickets because I still had a bunch of miles and credits from the Covid year and um and a pretty good deal on this.? Ah this airbnb. So it's It's I mean it's almost just as affordable as being anywhere else. So we're like well let's just we've got a free place to park the Rv. It's at my parents' house. Solar panels are are keeping the refrigerator and everything else running and we're like well if we're not paying for that. There. Let's just go somewhere else and and and and just work from here. So That's what we're doing. Yeah yeah, indeed indeed. So. 01:28.45 Paul Awesome! Well glad you can do that. 01:35.44 archpodnet All right? Well, we're going to talk about your recent excursion. We obviously talked a few podcasts about your setup for your um, your your technical approach I guess to the to the recent phase of the lagosh archeological project in Iraq. So why don't we start by. I guess I guess can you do like ah a brief what your plan was in just a few minutes and then we'll talk about how that went and and just some challenges and you know wins and and losses and things you would change next time but let's let's start by saying yeah, what was your what was your original plan for getting the survey done. 02:04.32 Paul Um, yeah, great. Okay, well the survey was one part of the project. Um, we had um we have ah you know it's it's gearing up to be a. Bigger long-term excavation with associated projects on it too and so I've brought in as kind of the go to tech guy. Um, so we had various components I was there in the fall you know for a very brief season. We had two weeks there where I was tasked with making a yeah, a topographic map. 02:29.54 archpodnet Oh. 02:38.72 Paul With ah with a drone of the entire site and so we accomplished that and we had then other things that we learned about from doing that that we wanted to experiment both with drones and then also we wanted to explore the overall use of the site. The development of the site over time. So I devised a surface survey. 02:40.00 archpodnet Now. 02:58.80 Paul That we could you know if it worked the way I expected we would be able to get a huge swath of this site done over the season and for you know and anybody's record. It's ah it's a very large site. It's ah it's over four hundred and fifty hectares the main part of the tell. 03:12.22 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 03:16.46 Paul So yeah, there's a lot of surface area to cover and back in episode one seventy I talked about what I was thinking of doing and I was taking some of the better ideas I've seen since I started on Crm last year a little under a year ago now and ah. 03:28.39 archpodnet Um. 03:33.52 Paul And then tried to bring those ideas back into the academic archeology that we're going to be doing specifically with respect to this surface survey so back in episode one seventy I was talking about devising a plan for doing a surface survey using. Um. Pre-plotted collection points. So I laid a grid across the entire site got the coordinates of Gps coordinates and then with ipads with Gps on them. Anybody on the survey team would basically go across the site plant themselves on the the Target location. 04:06.42 archpodnet Um. 04:08.85 Paul Each Target location had its own name unique name and and they would plant a stake in the ground. Ah I originally was thinking of a two meter tether but we ended up producing that down to one meters and just doing a circle around the stake with that tether collecting everything. Inside that that that area is circumscribed by the a by the tether and you know the market by the location and and come back and then process the data. So when I was talking about. Go ahead. 04:30.81 archpodnet Okay. 04:37.41 archpodnet Okay, and using now I was just wondering using that sampling method. Do you know what percentage of the area. You're actually sampling with that method. 04:49.52 Paul Ah, yeah, so the initial idea was with that two meter tether so that'd be a four meter diameter circle you know I because it's just math right? I know the ah the size of the site I know how many points there are so I tested in yeah gis a whole bunch of different grid sizes. 04:56.50 archpodnet Oh yeah. 05:08.90 Paul And then also some different um some different tether sizes and the circles. The catchments at each grid point and you know then I could just put that in the spreadsheet and see how much it was going to be so with that initial plan with the four meter diameter catchments. It was going to be just about 0.5 of the entire site. 05:15.40 archpodnet Who. 05:27.20 archpodnet Okay. 05:28.74 Paul As it turned out. Ah, the first thing I wanted to do was decide if that was a sensible area to cover and we planted ourselves on a really dense part of the site where we ended up getting 5 bags full of pottery. 05:41.67 archpodnet Um, this. 05:43.94 Paul And we realized pretty quickly that that was not going to be an appropriate way to deal with the site so we scaled it down to a one meter tether so two meter diameter circles at each of the collection points so that was a quarter of that so we're about point one three of the entire site once we get the entire site covered right now. Um. We managed to get 60% of the site done in the month that we're there which I take as a victory I think that this was really good and I can go into some details. Why I thought that was why I do consider this a victory. Um, but I also did want to say that you know that episode one seventy that was great because we had. 06:09.56 archpodnet Um, yeah. 06:21.39 Paul Ah, side discussions afterwards on the on the apn slack the ah the slack for the members and I was providing some very great ideas. You know some ways of simplifying some of my ideas a few different ways of visualizing them. So it. 06:25.87 archpodnet The members. Yeah. 06:39.57 Paul You know it didn't radically change what I wanted to do but it helped me it helped clarify what I was going to do what I was going to try to do and how I was going to approach it and so you know with that and some feedback I got from other members of the team. 06:44.68 archpodnet Yeah. 06:53.81 Paul By the time we got into the field I already knew exactly what we were going to do we had kits ready The software's all installed. Everything was ready to go I'd written up instruction manuals so we could just jump in on it and and that was one of the big benefits was actually just using this as a platform for myself. 07:12.14 archpodnet Hu. 07:12.71 Paul Selfishly when ah you know I've got this ah this microphone in front of me but it was to use this place as a platform for me to to hone my ideas and it really really worked well for that. 07:22.55 archpodnet Nice, nice. So we're going to talk about you know? Obviously we're going to get into this a little more but what did you could do any more drone work or anything while you were out there this time. 07:33.81 Paul Um, yeah I did some more drone work nothing as intensive as what I did in the fall. Um, but and we can talk about this in the later segment but I did drone work with the same drone setup that I had in the fall which was a yeah a dja Phantom for rtk. 07:38.67 archpodnet Um, yeah. 07:50.43 archpodnet Okay. 07:51.99 Paul And we're using that for fairly large parts of the site and also some areas outside of the site off the tell proper that is and and this is cool. So I'm definitely a who I talk about it but Satra Pi Zmenti who is one of the co-field directors brought her dja mini. 08:10.73 archpodnet Oh yeah, yeah. 08:11.89 Paul Drone The original Mini. Ah, which apparently she takes she goes. She's did a lot of field work all over and she brings this along as a matter of course in order to do much finer grain mapping at the level of the trenches and you know I definitely want to talk about what she did with that Because. Kind of knocked my socks off. 08:30.71 archpodnet Nice, nice. 08:33.21 Paul But before we get to that. Let's talk more a little more about the ah the surface survey. So um, across that entire site with that fifty meter grid there would have been seventeen hundred and eighty three Target Locations the first pass that you do with that ipad that Gps enabled ipad if you're on the survey team you land yourself on one of those points and you take a quick look and great it a b or c is it positive are there artifacts here. Is it negative. There are no artifacts here or is it a write-off. It's not in a good location for collecting. And that not in a good location could be a number of different reasons. It could be that you know where I plotted these points on Gis I plotted something off the site like over in a farmer's field that was one of the reason there's right off another reason to write off would be because there are. It's just dirt roads. But there are paths that. 09:15.72 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 09:26.50 Paul The cars drive over the site if one of the points ended up in one of those paths you you know? ah any collections you made from there would be pretty pointless. Ah the site has been excavated a number of times in the past. So there are old trenches and old spoil heaps and obviously. 09:27.85 archpodnet To her. 09:33.36 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 09:42.44 Paul Collecting surface collections from one of those locations would also be not the best thing would skew the the results So those were write offs as well. So We had this quick you know Green Red Gray positive negative write off and then collect everything within the catchment bag. It. Named the bag by the ah the collection point again they were all named uniquely and then at the end of the project I stopped with the survey a week before the project was over so that we could actually process all these bags. So of that. Um, that 1783 potential Targets. We hit over a thousand of them. 10:04.16 archpodnet Over. 10:17.66 archpodnet Wow, She's nice. 10:19.36 Paul So about 60% of the entire site was covered which means that when we go back in the fall. We'll be able to finish that off pretty easily and when I say we I started out with the with the survey and I did a few days of it myself until I was comfortable I worked out a few little kinks some things in the documentation that I figured could be done differently. 10:26.40 archpodnet Yeah. 10:39.21 Paul Ah, few things about procedure that I felt could be improved versus what my expectations were prior to going into it and then I taught zaidar rawi who's another ph d researcher working on the project and you know worked with him when I was comfortable with him. He helped me train in one of our um, one of our representatives hadder sadad and worked with him for a couple days. He trained in 1 of our other representatives abdulhalik jasse and then the 2 of them haid there and adulhaek just took off with it. 11:14.40 archpodnet Nice. 11:16.49 Paul And and they ran through the site So fast they they they put in such great work. Um, and that really was for me a big ah big win that was that I could train and they could train and they could and that we didn't have any real drop off on quality because the ah the initial planning was so straightforward. 11:30.20 archpodnet Moho. 11:34.50 archpodnet Yeah. 11:35.78 Paul And again that initial planning was only so straightforward because I got to hone the ideas off of feedback that I got on the on the member slack. 11:42.80 archpodnet Nice, Nice. That's really cool and I think that's a good sign of a ah sign of a good methodology because it shouldn't be complex shouldn't be overly complex right? It should be. You know, straightforward here's what we're doing here's why we're doing it and if you were able to. You know teach somebody that and then they're able to pass that knowledge on as Well. That's I mean that's awesome. That's the way it should be I think. 12:05.24 Paul Yeah, and one of the really big things. Why I was able to pass on the knowledge of how to do It is that that heidder and I after he'd spent a couple days with this. We sat down and we bilingualized the data collection. So you know when I first wrote it It was all in in english. 12:15.40 archpodnet Oh wow. 12:23.59 Paul But now all the menu options every pull down everything that you could fill out was both in English and Arabic and that made it easier for him to teach abdulhalik. But also I think that as just as a matter of course that is something important. It really rubbed me the wrong way that I was. 12:28.65 archpodnet Wow. 12:43.75 Paul Producing something for work in Iraq that only had an english front end to it so having this bilingual front end then meant that I was I felt like I was being more responsible more courteous to the people whose country I was working in and. 12:47.10 archpodnet Yeah, yeah, yeah. 13:02.20 Paul I Think that it accounted for a better result in the end not just because he could train adelhailek and they could do it quickly but because he wasn't always guessing what exactly this English word was he had helped me translate So we'd actually gone through a fairly deep dive as to what the different things were. 13:12.26 archpodnet Oh. 13:19.48 archpodnet Nice, Nice. Yeah. 13:20.90 Paul Right? Why something might be a write off. Yeah, it wasn't just ah, a word on a piece of paper or in this case on an ipad. It was an actual discussion. Well do we want to write off. Ah you know Animal burros. Yeah, probably okay well why would that be well that affects the site and you know and it's. Churning up stuff from deeper underground. Okay, but you know we had those discussions. Ah, which yeah the hyder the other representatives they're they're Professionals. They understand this they care for it Probably in a way that I couldn't ever hope to because it's their country. Um. 13:42.20 archpodnet Who. 13:56.93 Paul But having those discussions we could think they honed my thoughts I own theirs and we got together a better product in the end and that product again being this data collection software. You know oh and I don't think I mentioned it yet today but the but I did mention on episode One seventy is that. What I ended up settling on for the data collection software was archgis field maps um, and the reason was yeah I looked at at a bunch of different data collection software but University Of Pennsylvania has a license to rgis which gives them access to field maps. So I could install that meant no extra. 14:16.20 archpodnet Okay, yeah. 14:32.60 archpodnet True. 14:32.44 Paul Software cost I could have done this in other mobile Gis packages. But that's what we went with it was a little weird to set up initially. But once I got my brain around how it worked how to set things up that worked really nicely and then again I was able to bilingualize it because it didn't choke too badly on it. 14:40.77 archpodnet Who. 14:52.72 Paul Bilingual stuff is often a problem but it's really often a problem when you're working in another script. That's right to left as opposed to left right? right? So working with Arabic which also has ligatures that don't exist in in Latin languages um software either handles it or it chokes badly. 14:58.51 archpodnet Red. 15:10.56 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 15:12.10 Paul And I only had a couple places where that field Maps data collection was having a little bit of a trouble not enough to to cause any problems but just enough to look a little funny in my eyes. 15:20.74 archpodnet Nice, Nice. Yeah,, That's ah, that's something getting both of those languages in there First off, that's awesome to be able to to be able to see that and then yeah having it. It does make sense to have it in the in the local language and to have it. You know, just work like that. So I Totally get that too. Ah yeah. 15:39.50 Paul Yeah I think it's an ethical obligation to try to be as inclusive as possible and that's something that you know that western researchers in the Middle East have long been dinged for rightfully so is that they go in like with the colonial mindset that hey we know best. 15:51.92 archpodnet Sure. 15:57.35 Paul And you have to adapt to us you know and that said I don't speak Arabic nearly as well as I should and I'm very embarrassed by that. But but I do recognize that that's something I have to work on and fix and so in the little places I could like again like bilingualizing the data collection. That's something that that was fairly easy easily accomplished. But but I think brought a much greater benefit than the effort. It took. 16:18.57 archpodnet Huho. 16:22.74 archpodnet Speaking Arabic is 1 thing especially when you're around people but can you read any arabic too. Yeah, that's ah yeah, ah yeah. 16:28.22 Paul Um, yeah I can. It's very phonetic. So once you learn the the characters and how they link together one character the other what those ligatures are um, you can probably get the pronunciation. 16:42.68 archpodnet Okay. 16:44.68 Paul Maybe not always depending on a variety of factors and once your vocabulary reaches a certain level. You can probably guess the meaning of words that you don't previously know I'm maybe at the cusp of doing that but but I can't read much so you know I can read words. 16:58.82 archpodnet Okay, Brett right? all right? Well on that note, let's ah, go ahead and take a break and we'll come back and continue talking to Paul about his experiences on the logosh archeological project in Iraq. 17:04.49 Paul But not sentences. Let's put it that way. 17:17.56 archpodnet This past month and a half or so all right back in a minute.