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RursuSpicae 1, 2018

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RursuSpicae 1, 2018.

Éditeur : OpenEditions Journals
ISBN : ISSN 2557-8839

Annonce de parution RursuSpicae : nouveau site en ligne – nouveau numéro paru

Mise en ligne, sur OpenEdition Journals (ex-Revues.org) de la revue RursuSpicae. Transmission, réception et réécriture des textes, de l'Antiquité au Moyen Âge.
La création de ce périodique résulte de la fusion des deux revues Rursus, Poïétique, réception et réécriture des textes antiques, et Spicae. Cahiers de l'Atelier Vincent de Beauvais, qui toutes deux portaient sur les réécritures de textes, pour l'Antiquité et le Moyen Âge.
Un numéro sur les "Parodies et pastiches antiques" vient de paraître sur le nouveau site.

Source : https://journals.openedition.org/rursuspicae/276


Men in court over Leominster Anglo-Saxon treasure charges

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Reportedly, four men will appear in court today, charged with dealing in tainted cultural artefacts that were discovered by metal detectorists. This relates to a collection (hoard?) of Anglo-Saxon and Viking artefacts (gold and silver coins, a gold ring, gold arm bracelet, crystal sphere, and silver ingots) found in 2015 in a village near Leominster, Herefordshire, in 2015. According to West Mercia police, the men that will appear in court are George Powell, 37, of Coulson Close, Pill, Newport; Layton Davies, 50, of Cardiff Road, Pontypridd; Paul Well, 59, of Newport Road, Cardiff; and Simon Wicks, 56, of Hawks Road, Hailsham, East Sussex.

The Archaeological Values of the PAS Database (V): The so-called Crosby Garrett Helmet

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Archaeology and commerce
 (Seattle Times)
The revelation by a FeudingFLO from Durham that the PAS has been obscuring findspots of items from a cemetery excavated this year in Scremby in East Lindsy brings to mind another case of the same kind. A few years ago there was huge publicity about a campaign to save for a public collection the heavily reconstructed helmet being offered for sale by Christie's that the auctioneers insisted had been found by an unnamed detectorist (whose identity still remains unknown) on a farm in May 2010 in a little place far from any former Roman cavalry fort at Crosby Garrett. The object was at once dubbed 'the Crosby Garrett Helmet', the name by which it was publicly known from the beginning (Christie's (London) 7 October 2010, lot 176). Yet When eventually the PAS was shown the place the finders said it had come from and the place was excavated, as many questions remain as before. It is interestng to note that, even though we now know the precise pit in which the finders reported they'd dug the object from (and this too is public knowledge), the PAS record is extraordinarily vague about the findspot ( County or Unitary authority: Cumbria (County)/ District: Eden (District) / To be known as: North Cumbria) . Is the fact that illegal metal detecting took place on adjacent Little Asby Common in some way related to this? Or is it not a fact that almost anywhere you can get to that has earthworks and nobody living right next to it is probne to looting of this type? No, there has to be a reason that the PAS are refusing to say that this object actually was found at Crosby Garrett, what is it?


Naughty Treasure Finders

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Treasure finds going up
There is now a new page on the Treasure section of the PAS/Treasure website listing the abatements of Treasure rewards recommended by the TVC since 2007. There were 20 in a total of 3418 found 2007 and 2015 (the last year for which figures seem available).* Reasons are given for these abatements. 12 were for detecting on land and taking finds and not subsequently reporting them where there was no 'search and take' permission from the landowner (trespass and theft) in one case the land concerned was a SAM, four rewards were abated because of cases where the authorities became aware of finds that were simply not reported, two for situations where it was found out that a misleading location had been given. Two were for ovrcleaning an object or inexpert restoration (damage to property). In no case is any mention made of any legal sanctions being applied to the person declared guilty of these offences. There are no cases of Treasure abatement  being applied to landowners, it is only Treasure hunters that are mentioned. Neither are there any cases mentioned where the finders refused to stop digging and call in archaeologists, that led to loss of archaeological information.


* with about 1000 being found now annually, the total will be about 6500 in the period after 2007.

« Te mêlant à des étrangers »

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Le jeudi 29 novembre 2018,Ariane Guieu-Coppolani (Université de Paris-Sorbonne) donnera une conférence dans le cadre du Séminaire International d’Histoire Ancienne intitulée : « ‘Te mêlant à des étrangers’ : retour sur les mobilités et les relations avec l’étranger à l’époque homérique ». La conférence aura lieu en salle G04 (bâtiment G, rez-de-chaussée) à 18h.

Définir le rapport des Grecs à l’étranger à l’époque classique est relativement simple : au citoyen s’oppose le non-citoyen, dépourvu de droits dans la cité qui n’est pas la sienne ; au Grec s’oppose le barbare culturellement inférieur. Mais ces distinctions sont beaucoup moins opératoires à l’époque archaïque. On voudrait aujourd’hui faire retour sur les documents littéraires les plus anciens qui nous soient parvenus de l’archaïsme grec : les poèmes homériques, à la fois contemporains des balbutiements de la cité comme des premiers temps du grand mouvement de colonisation, et référence culturelle fondamentale pour les Grecs des époques postérieures. Nous analyserons les mobilités dans le monde homérique, et nous pencherons sur l’image des non-Achéens ainsi que sur le vocabulaire pour mettre en lumière un monde ouvert où, si des termes comme allodapos et xenos montrent que la notion d’étranger existe, celle-ci ne fait pas l’objet d’une construction spécifique, et encore moins de méfiance, d’hostilité ou de mépris – à une exception près, que nous devrons analyser. Au contraire, de l’Iliadeà l’Odyssée, on voit se développer, en même temps que les occasions de déplacements, l’institution de l’hospitalité.

2018.11.45: Romance and Reason: Islamic Transformations of the Classical Past

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Review of Roberta Casagrande-Kim, Samuel Thrope, Raquel Ukeles, Romance and Reason: Islamic Transformations of the Classical Past. Princeton: 2018. Pp. 144. $35.00 (pb). ISBN 9780691181844.

2018.11.46: Greek Sanctuaries and Temple Architecture: An Introduction

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Review of Mary Emerson, Greek Sanctuaries and Temple Architecture: An Introduction. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: 2018. Pp. xx, 270. $25.95 (pb). ISBN 9781472575289.

2018.11.47: Geç Antik Çağ'da Lykos Vadisi ve Çevresi / The Lykos Valley and Neighbourhood in Late Antiquity. Laodikeia Çalışmaları, Ek Yayın Dizisi/Supplementary Series 1, 1

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Review of Celal Şimşek, Turhan Kaçar, Geç Antik Çağ'da Lykos Vadisi ve Çevresi / The Lykos Valley and Neighbourhood in Late Antiquity. Laodikeia Çalışmaları, Ek Yayın Dizisi/Supplementary Series 1, 1. Istanbul: 2018. Pp. 472. ISBN 9786059680585.

2018.11.48: Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, supplements, 409

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Review of Roel Konijnendijk, Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, supplements, 409. Leiden: 2017. Pp. vi, 261. €104,00. ISBN 9789004355361.

BHD on Codex Sinaiticus and Tischendorf

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Talking Walls

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Aedilitian Inscriptions in the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean

Mahanaim and Penuel

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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/ABNx/~4/d3z6w7jSlz0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>

NG on the search for sacred texts

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<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blogspot/ABNx/~4/rW1qrt5FUaw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>

ReligionProf Podcast with Douglas Estes

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This week’s podcast features Douglas Estes, a New Testament scholar like myself who also engages with Christianity, culture, and technology. His latest book is Braving the Future, and some of you may have seen the article in Christianity Today about it. This is going to be a two-parter – there’s too much interesting stuff to talk about […]

Relic found in Denmark belonged to influential 14th-century woman

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A recently-discovered seal stamp belonged to a key figure in rebellious movements in Jutland in the...

Accessing the Annual of ASOR

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This past month, I was named editor of the Annual of ASOR. It’s a book series organized into annual volumes on various archaeological topics. Historically, it would appear that the Annual began as an outlet for research from the various members of the schools of Oriental research. How it differed from the contemporary Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research is a bit unclear except that the Annual was in its early years more substantial and included longer, more lavishly illustrated articles. These two publications of ASOR represented the technical and professional output of the American Schools in distinction to Biblical Archaeologist (now Near Eastern Archaeology) founded in 1938 and dedicated to more accessible and popular writing about archaeology in the Middle East.

Today, the function and scope of AASOR is a bit less clear. Work on contemporary sites has increasingly appeared in the Archaeological Report Series which began in 1991 or in BASOR which is a modern and well-edited professional journal. As a result, AASOR has become the outlet for legacy projects and edited collections of articles that deal with topics broadly of interest to ASOR members. I find this eclecticism appealing especially in a world of increasingly specialized publications in our field, but I also recognize that this eclecticism might be confusing to scholars who are looking for an outlet for their work. It seems like the 100th anniversary of the AASOR in 2020 might be an opportunity to make the series more visible and to reflect on its history, contributions and potential for the future.

Along similar lines, the eclecticism of AASOR has made it a bit of a challenge to make the series more available in open digital forms. ASOR has been fortunately to benefit from the efforts of Chuck Jones who led the committee on publications for over a decade and worked to release back ASOR content in relatively open, digital forms. 

The first 20-some volumes of AASOR are available for free download various places (with some obviously in the public domain):

The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1919/1920, vol. 1 (jstor, Hathi Trust, Google books).
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1921/1922, vol 2/3 (jstor)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1922/1923, vol. 4 (jstor, Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1923/1924, vol. 5 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1924/1925, vol. 6 (Hathi Trust)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1925/1926, vol. 7 (Hathi Trust)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1926/1927, vol. 8 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1927/1928, vol. 9 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1927/1928, vol. 10 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1929/1930, vol. 11 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1930/1931, vol. 12 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1931/1932, vol. 13 (Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1933/1934, vol. 14 (Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1934/1935, vol. 15 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1935/1936, vol. 16 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1936/1937, vol. 17 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
Explorations in Eastern Palestine, III, vol. 18/19 (Hathi Trust, Archive.org)
Introduction to Hurrian, vol. 20 (Hathi Trust)
The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim. Vol. III: The Iron Age 1941 – 1943, vol. 21/22 (Not Available)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1943/1944, vol. 23 (Hathi Trust)
The annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 1944/1945, vol. 24 (Hathi Trust

After volume 24, things get a bit more irregular, with the exception of volume 32/33:

The excavation at Herodian Jericho, 1951, vol. 32/33 (Hathi Trust)

Things get better again, however, after volume 55:

Preliminary excavation reports and other archaeological investigations : Tell Qarqur, Iron I sites in the North-Central highlands of Palestine, vol. 56 (Hathi Trust)
Across the Anatolian plateau : readings in the archaeology of ancient Turkey, vol. 57 (Not Available)
The Near East in the southwest : essays in honor of William G. Dever, vol. 58 (Hathi Trust)
Results of the 2001 Kerak Plateau Early Bronze Age survey AND Two early alphabetic inscriptions from the Wadi el-Ḥôl: new evidence for the origin of the alphabet from the western desert of Egypt, vol. 59 (Hathi Trust)
The archaeology of difference : gender, ethnicity, class and the “other” in antiquity : studies in honor of Eric M. Meyers, vol. 60/61 (Hathi Trust)
The middle Bronze Age IIA cemetery at Gesher : final report, vol. 62 (Hathi Trust
Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus, vol. 63 (Hathi Trust)

The three most recent volumes (64, 65, and 68) are only available via Jstor with a subscription. All in all, 27 of the 66 published volumes are available for free download (and a few more can be viewed at Hathi Trust, but not downloaded). This is something that should be easy enough to sort out and it would be outstanding to try to get all 66 volumes of AASOR available for free download by 2020 (or at least those still not generating some income for ASOR).

The existing content available from AASOR offers an intriguing body of data that could, for example, be analyzed for the history of the publication or the discipline, mined for spatial data and plotted on a map, or queried for references and citations. While the earliest volumes have entered the public domain making them available for all sort of remixing and classroom use, the latter volumes are often under a CC By-NC-ND license making them a bit harder to play with. 

(If you notice a mistake in this list, please drop me a line in the comments. I’ll post a list of AASOR volumes and their accessibility to Google Sheets when I tidy up my own spreadsheet.)

I’m also scheming up some ideas for new AASOR volumes, but I’ll share that with the ole blog when they begin to get a bit more focus (and when I have a better sense for whether people will be interested!).

DCC 2018 analytics

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This is the time of year when I examine the site analytics for DCC, ahead of the editorial board get together at the SCS annual meeting. Use of DCC continues to grow, according to Google Analytics. In the last calendar year the site had a total of 1,033,730 page views, a new high. The graphs below show (1) the growth over last year; (2) the most popular parts of the site (Allen and Greenough continues to prevail there), and (3) the most popular commentaries, excluding the reference works. All this is for December 2017-November 2018. Monthly data in four different metrics for each commentary is on the site. Thank you to all the many scholars—students, secondary teachers, and college and university faculty—who have contributed to DCC this year. Thanks are also due to the editorial board for their work on peer review and editing, and to our fine Drupal developer Ryan Burke of Dickinson’s Academic Technology office. Happy Holidays, everybody!

 

DCC total monthly page views, 2017-2018

1: DCC total monthly page views, 2017-2018

 

DCC analytics by content type, December 2017 to November 2018

2: DCC analytics by content type, December 2017 to November 2018

 

DCC analytics, Nov. 2017 to Nov. 2018 just commentaries, not reference works

3: DCC analytics, Nov. 2017 to Nov. 2018 just commentaries, not reference works

Analytics term definitions:

Pageviews: the total number of pages viewed over the date range in question. Repeated views of a single page by the same user are counted. A Pageview is counted every time a specific page is loaded.

Unique Pageviews: the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. Unique Pageviews are counted for every session, including distinct sessions by the same user during the specified date range (30 minutes of inactivity ends a session). A Unique Pageview is counted for each page URL + page Title combination.

Users: distinct IP addresses that have had at least one session within the selected date range. Includes both new and returning Users. A User is counted in every session that User visits the site or a commentary during the selected date range. Subtracting the figure for New Users from this figure yields the number of people who visited, left, and returned.

New Users: the number of first-time Users (distinct IP addresses) during the selected date range. They may be returning Users from a time before the selected date range.

From Agent Models to Archaeogaming: A Digital Archaeology

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I’ve been working away on a new book.  I’m sharing with you now the current state of the introduction. It doesn’t quite hang together yet, and I need to stop with the whole zombie schtick (‘golems’ are a better metaphor), but anyway. Would you read this book? I need a better title, too.

~o0o~

This book is about, in a narrow sense, the ways in which I’ve reanimated Roman society using agent based modelling and archaeogaming. But in a larger sense, it’s about digital enchantment in the ways that scholars like Sara Perry (2018),  Russel Staiff (2014), and Yannis Hamilkais (2014) have written. It’s about responding to archaeology not as a crisis to be solved, but as source for wonder. It’s about whether digital archaeology is fast or slow, whether it is engaging or alienating, whether or not it is sensory and sensual.

What are computers for, in archaeology?

The question might seem absurd. What is a pencil for? A shovel? A database? Our tools are only ever appropriate to particular situations. Not every moment on an excavation requires a mattock or a pail; a dental pick and a dustpan might be called for. By the same token, maybe we don’t always require a computer to achieve a digital archaeology. Maybe a smartphone is all we need. Maybe an iPad. Maybe we just need what Jentery Sayers (2018, elaborating on Kershenbaum 2009) calls ‘paper computers’.

The point is, if we stop simply accepting that a computer is always necessary, we can see again some of the enchantment these amazing devices possess, and we can begin to imagine again the kinds of questions they might be best suited to. There is any amount of criticism of computing, of digital archaeology that focuses on the alienating aspects of the work. Caraher has argued that to use a computer as part of your process, whether in the field or in the lab is to somehow be pushed away from the tacit and sensuous ways-of-knowing that characterize the doing of archaeology (2015).

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions of these devices. For me, the use of computation in archaeology is a kind of magic, a way of heightening my archaeological imagination to see in ways I couldn’t. It lets me raise the dead (digital zombies?) with all the terror wonder, and ethical problems that that implies. Shouldn’t we raise the dead?  Why shouldn’t we put words in their mouths, give them voices, and talk with them to find out more about their (after) lives?

In this book, I’m making an argument that a slow, reflexive, sensual, enchanted engagement with the past is possible (even desirable) when we use digital computational approaches. That is not to say that it is not a rigorous approach. The first step in this approach is a clear formalism, a clear re-statement in code about what I believe to be true about the past. It has to be that way, because the fundamental action of the computer is to copy. Decisions we take in a computational medium are multiplied and accelerated, so those initial decisions can have unintended or unforeseen consequences when they are rendered computational.

Such formalisms also have to be rendered as relationships as well. Research on artificial neural networks demonstrates that meaning can emerge through cascades of coordinated firings of neurones through weighted channels, backwards and forwards. These weights do not need to be known beforehand, but can be learned as the network is exposed to stimuli. To my mind, this points to a way of computing the past that does not rely on higher-level equations that describe a social phenomenon, but rather a way of letting interaction precede the equation. We set up the conditions for interactions,  relationships, and networks to emerge. Understand that I am not arguing for a naive use of computing and letting answers percolate out. That is nonsense. Rather, I am arguing for the correct level of complexity to model, to put into a simulation. The first part of this book is a consideration of networks as a substrate; the second revivifies these networks, raising the dead through simulation.

These are games that play themselves, these simulations. Wouldn’t it be interesting to enter the game ourselves? This is part of the enchantment. In the third part of this book I discuss what it takes to make this happen, and what archaeogaming, chatbots, and other playful digital toys can offer to our research and more importantly for the audience for whom archaeology holds wonder. I weave throughout this book my engagement with what makes digital work sensuous and enchanting in the ways that Perry and Staiff describe. It is unapologetically a personal engagement.

~o0o~

Insofar as the actual archaeological data in this book and my computational engagements with them are concerned, I have collected together and edited some of my previously published papers that employ a variety of small thought experiments and agent-based models and toys. The computational parts are tools-to-think-with, rather than things that will prove an hypothesis. They are arranged in a logic that reflects the way that I have come to think about Roman society, especially cities and the social life within them. It seems to me that Roman cities and societies can be thought of as nodes of entangled systems, as biological processes that smear across boundaries and scales, and whose actions can be modeled upon those entanglements. With video game technologies, we can insert the researcher/student/public into the model for deeper learning, engagement: a first person perspective. Not I should hasten to add, a Roman perspective. Rather, a deformation of our own just-so stories we tell about the past with the authority provided by a disembodied narration. If there is truth in the stories we tell, then there is truth in the embodied perspective provided by a computational rendering of that story.

I have done my best to excise that part of me that writes in impenetrable archaeo-jargon. Forgive me my failures. I write this book not so much for an academic audience invested heavily in modelling and simulation, but rather for my history students afraid to engage with digital work. It is when things break and in the cleavages that we see most clearly the problems and potentials of technology, and so failure is a necessary part of the process.

The book shifts scales quite often.  It begins with a focus on the flows of energy and materials necessary to sustain the exoskeleton of the City, its built fabric. We then expand outwards to consider the fossilized traces of the social networks that enabled that flow. Once we have a network, we consider ways in which the equifinality of networks can be used to iterate our deformations, our perspectives, and so the kinds of questions we might ask. Now that we are at a regional level, the next chapter considers a model of regional space, its interactions, and the ways local interactions give rise to global structures.The remainder of the book deals with ways we can use these simulations, and these archaeological networks, for generating insight into the social contexts of Roman power. The book returns to where we started, with the city, and concludes with new work exploring the ways that the city-builder genre conditions our understanding of ancient cities, and how we might subvert, divert, and repurpose such games to our own ends.

These particular case studies are wrapped in a larger argument about the proper role of computation in archaeology. In the end, I do not subscribe to a techno-chauvinism that sees digital responses as the obvious end-goal for archaeology, nor a techno-utopianism that describes what ought to be (cf Broussard 2018). Rather, I see space for a creative engagement with digital tools that opens up a landscape, a tasks cape, for returning some enchantment to what we do.

~o0o~

My first encounter with ‘real’ archaeology was as an 18 year old college student on his first real adventure out of the country (out of the back woods, in truth). We were working (paying to work) on an excavation in the Peloponnesus, in the hinterland of Corinth. In the bottom of the high mountain valley of Zaraka you will find lake Stymphalos, where Hercules defeated the Stymphalian Birds. Not much of note happened in this valley; the Romans marched through on their way to annihilating Corinth in 142 BCE; the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade built a monastery. During the second world war and subsequent Greek Civil War, bitter battles were fought for control of the area. Sometime in the 15th century a person was buried and their head lopped off, for future archaeologists to find, and to feed stories of Balkan vampires; but that’s about it.

My trench? My trench was full of bricks. The trench next to mine? That was the trench with the vampire in it.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m now in Rome, hot on the trail of aqueduct remains across the Roman countryside on a vespa scooter. Thomas Ashby and Esther van Deman had done this during the interwar years (without the vespa), but Rome and its countryside were a very different place, then. Armed with copious photocopies,  a dog-eared copy of  Trevor Hodge’s Roman Aqueducts and Water Supply, and a military topographic map (thirty years out of date) I zoomed down the lanes and byways and industrial estates on the modern periphery of Rome. When I found some ruins, I tried to correlate what I found with the descriptions in Ashby and van Deman. I measured, I photographed, and I drew. The point of these exertions was a massive Excel database that used my basic understanding of the geometry of solids (is it pie-r-squared or half the width times the height or…) to build a beautiful mathematical model of the finished aqueduct. I spent three months pulling this model apart to figure out the quantities of human labour and materials to make this structure. Back on the road, to double check, to find the missing pieces… a glorious summer of roadside picnics, coffees in truck stops, shepherd dogs chasing me from the fields, climbing down into ravines or up onto brick lined vaults.

A few years later, and it’s just me staring at a storage shed full of bricks. Roman bricks are heavy. They are large, and they are thick. They litter the fields of Italy. When they are collected, it is sometimes to take a geochemical peek at their composition. Where might they clays come from? More often, it is because they contain very complex makers’ marks, these bricks from near Rome. They tell you a year, an estate, a brick maker, a landlord. They remind me a lot of how marks on timber floated down the Ottawa River were used by the timber barons to keep records straight, for paying for the use of timber slides, for working out who owned what. I find them interesting, but in self defence against the teasing I receive – hey brickstamp boy! – I play up the boring bit. Hell, we’re archaeologists, we can’t always excavate vampires, right?

Vampires.

Raising the dead.

Hmmmm….

It’s about this point where I first encounter the idea of ‘social networks’ – a full decade before Facebook – and I start to wonder what I might see if I tie these estate owners, estate names, brick makers, makers’ marks and so on together.

In the blue glow of the cathode-ray monitor, the tangled hairball of connections starts to emerge and I begin to see changing patterns over time, patterns that begin to give life to these long dead workers….

~o0o~

This is a book about the practical magic – the practical necromancy? – that digital archaeology brings to the larger field. To use computers in the course of doing archaeological research does not a digital archaeology make. Digital archaeology requires enchantment. When we are using computers, the computer is not a passive tool. It is an active agent in its own right. The way it is built, the way the code is designed, contain so many elements of unconscious bias from all of its myriad creators (and blood: do not forget how much actual human blood is shed to obtain the rare earths and minerals upon which computing rests [reference to that alexa AI map]) means that the computer is our co-creator. In a video game, the experience of the player is not the result of a passive reception of representation by the game author. The player’s active engagement with the emergent representation of the rules put in motion by the author but interpreted in the context of the local game environment means that meaning of the game is the product of three authors. We can see this in video games, but it’s not always clear that this is also true of say GIS or 3d photogrammetry.

In that emergent dynamic, in that co-creation with a non-human but active agent, we might find the enchantment, the magic of archaeology that is currently lacking in archaeology. Sara Perry identifies the lack of magic, the lack of enchantment, in the ‘crisis’ model of archaeology that animates our teaching, our research, and our public outreach. If archaeology is always in danger, then every act of archaeology is an act of rescue, and every act of rescue implies a morality play, a this-is-good-for-you aesthetic to which the public should respond appropriately.

Is it any wonder that the History Channel is filled with ancient aliens nonsense rather than ‘proper’ documentaries?  [Brenna Haslett on ghost hunters?]

Archaeology – academic archaeology – has lost its grip on wonder and enchantment and romance. This is not a plea to sanitize the past, or to pander to tired tropes (but remember: most of those tropes were created by archaeologists who went out of their way to communicate their research to the public. It is not their fault that subsequent archaeologists turned their backs on the public and let those tropes fester). It is a plea to find the magic and wonder in what they do. [St george and the vampire?]

And so I offer this book, a guide to practical necromancy, in that spirit. By pulling together the connective threads on nearly twenty years of work in simulation, agent modelling, video games, and Roman economic history, I want to map out a way for digital archaeology to connect with what Andrew Reinhard has identified as ‘archaeogaming’: if I take the fossils of a Roman social network, and reanimate them with autonomous software agents, just what kind of digital archaeology have I created? What other kinds are out there?

Eight limestone sarcophagi with mummies found near Giza's Great Pyramids

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During excavation work in the area to the northeastern side of Amenemhat II’s tomb in the Dahshour necropolis in Giza, an Egyptian archaeological mission has stumbled upon eight graves from the Late Period. Credit: Egypt. Ministry of Antiquities (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, explains that the graves contain limestone sarcophagi with mummies...

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Wall Maps Published in 2011 Now Re-Issued

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The seven large Wall Maps produced by the Center and published by Routledge in 2011 have gone out of print, and the rights have reverted to the Center. We are pleased to make all seven available digitally (Map 6 now incorporating small corrections). It is possible to print from these files. The series is openly licensed under Creative Commons by 4.0.

• View all seven maps both from a distance and up close. • Designed for use, not by specialists, but by students new to antiquity and by their instructors in introductory courses. • Clear, uncluttered presentation of places and features most likely to be encountered at this entry level. • Familiar English forms for names are normally marked (except on Map 7). No accompanying text or gazetteer. • Locator outline shows the scope of each map in relation to others in the set, incorporating the boundaries and names (abbreviated) of the modern countries covered.

Dimensions (in inches) are for the entire map, width x height. All maps are plotted on 300dpi satellite images in the public domain; landscape is returned to its ancient aspect. Inks/color palette: red, green, blue.

1. (70 x 50) Egypt and the Near East, 3000 to 1200 BCE. Scale: 1:1,750,000. Available here.

1 Near_East earlier.jpg

2. (70 x 50) Egypt and the Near East, 1200 to 500 BCE. Scale: 1:1,750,000. Available here.

2 Near_East later.jpg

3. (66 x 48) Greece and the Aegean in the Fifth Century BCE. Scale: 1:750,000. Available here.

3 Aegean World .jpg

4. (65 x 35) Greece and Persia in the Time of Alexander the Great. Scale: 1:4,000,000. Available here.

4 Alexander.jpg

5. (70 x 58) Italy in the Mid-First Century CE. Scale: 1:775,000. Available here.

5 Italy.jpg

6. (65 x 50) The World of the New Testament and the Journeys of Paul. Scale: 1:1,750,000. Inset “New Testament Palestine” (Scale 1:350,000). Available here.

6 New_Testament Corrected 2018.jpg

7. (75 x 56) The Roman Empire around 200 CE. Scale: 1:3,000,000. Available here.

Image result for routledge wall maps roman empire

 

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