Anthony Beck and Cameron Neylon‘s paper titled ‘A vision for Open Archaeology’ has been published in the journal of World Archaeology. It’s a paper about ‘Open Archaeology’ and ‘Open Science‘ in a journal which is ‘Open Access‘ (or at least for the first six months – get it while you can). You need to register with Taylor and Francis to get access. Links to registration can be found here.
This issue represents an important landmark for those undertaking ‘open’ approaches within archaeology. It brings together a number of researchers and leaders …

We’ve completed our 14 months of data collection at the sites. However, due to some teething troubles we wanted to continue collecting soil moisture, soil temperature and weather data collection at the Cambridgeshire site. The site uses the bespoke probes from Birmingham and the IMCO probes (1 set on loan from Van Walt Ltd.). I’m very glad to say that the landowner has agreed to extend the survey until April 2013 and Van Walt Ltd. have agreed to continue the loan of the IMCO equipment.
 
THANKS TO ALL

This post will be revised as corrections are sent through by colleagues to correct my ignorance on certain scientific issues and what happened in practice.
We proposed a thermal imaging experiment at the RAC in Cirencester. This was originally instigated after viewing the diurnal temperature variations from the embedded probes and wondering what the impact of the vegetation canopy would be on any sensor. This was given life with follow up conversations with John and Rosie Wells (West Lothian Archaeology).
Between the 18th and 22nd June 2012 two diurnal measurement experiments were …

Last night I was browsing Reddit and came across the following post. This provided a very simple and clear infographic concerning the relationship between evidence, theory and knowledge. This is a very important concept for DART. The original poster placed their version in Wikicommons under a CC-BY-SA licence here. I recreated the image from scratch to get over some formatting issues for enhance re-use and re-hosted in the same fashion here and here.

 
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This file is available on …

ALLEA (ALL European Academies) The European Federation of National Academies of Sciences and Humanities has released a declaration concerning Open Science in the 21st Century. It is available here. This powerful, but short, document sets the scene for the potential future impact of Open Science. Rather than paraphrasing it I’ll just leave the pre-amble here…….
Data are the bedrock on which the scientific edifice is built. More efficient data-sharing and more open access to information and resources will make it easier for observations to be confirmed, experiments to be replicated, hypothesis …

ASSESSING THE UTILITY OF HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING FOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL PROSPECTION AND MAPPING
Is a new project from EH and Birmingham VISTA centre. This project is essentially evaluating how fine spatial resolution satellite sensors (c. 0.5m panchromatic and c. 2m 4 band multispectral) can be used within the National Mapping Programme workflow. This promises to provide a useful benchmark from which to evaluate the utility of new technologies (particularly large footprint near-infrared imagery).
 
The project is managed by DART stakeholder Keith Challis and DART will liaise with this team. We have already …

During the window of beautiful weather (26th – 30th March) Anthony Beck, Dan Boddice, Rob Fry, Chris Gaffney and David Stott all attended the Computer Applications in Archaeology conference in Southampton. The conference was fantastic: there were 8 sessions of interesting presentations, many useful contacts and new friendships were made (as well as old friendships renewed) and there was obviously the socialising! It was interesting to put physical form to people I had only seen as twitter avatars. Dan, Rob and David all gave very good presentations on their different …

What better way to celebrate Valentine’s day than sharing the gift of data. Ok there are other ways but this is what Ant Beck did at the Royal Agricultural College (RAC) in Cirencester. RAC are one of DART’s project partners. As well as providing access to sites the RAC have provided enormous support for the project. In addition to staff and students from the RAC audience members included parish representatives and the estate manager from the defence facility adjacent to Harnhill.
Ant gave an introductory presentation which included an overview of …

On the 13th of Feburary Ant Beck, Doreen Boyd and David Stott had a meeting with Gary Llewellyn, Phil and James of NERC ARSF to discuss the hyperspectral flights over Harnhill and Diddington. It was an excellent meeting and many thanks to the ARSF team for their hospitality.
 
The ARSF award included hyperspectral (EAGLE and HAWK) and aerial photographs (Leica RCD105 digital camera). Subject to logistics we agreed to capture flights as follows:
 
Early Spring – March (No/little competition)
Late Spring- April/May (Little competition) we will provide 2 to 3 week window
Summer – …

Yesterday I was in Leuven sitting on the review panel evaluating if the ANAGHLIA (Analysis and ground truthing of hyperspectral and LiDAR images in Archaeology) project should get funding. It did. You can find my notes from the meeting here.
 
Although it does not have the temporal depth and vegetation element of DART, ANAGHLIA is a good project, with an excellent multi-disciplinary team that promises to make some significant advances – particularly in the area of spectral analyses (I was impressed by the approaches for ‘unmixing of very similar spectral classes …