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> Since 2004, Dr. Hublin and his colleagues have been working through layers of rocks on a desert hillside at Jebel Irhoud. I have so much respect for archeolo
by apeace 9y ago
> Since 2004, Dr. Hublin and his colleagues have been working through layers of rocks on a desert hillside at Jebel Irhoud.
I have so much respect for archeologists. Spending over a decade in one spot, literally on hands and knees, digging and meticulously sifting through anything that is found, is to me the epitome of dedication to a craft.
But another part of me thinks: there must be a better way!
I know that expeditions often hire bands of locals to help them dig and sift. But does anybody know, have there ever been any advances in this field to make the process go faster, or require less human toiling?
- nerdponx 9y agoThat might be an interesting project. Deep learning + a headset camera thing.
- abakker 9y agoSmall observation: I worked on a dinosaur dig in Montana for 2 summers as a teen. a major problem was not identification of the bones in our case, but the fragility of the bones we were digging. Maybe 50% of our time was flaking rock away slowly with a an icepick, sweeping up the crushed rock, putting it in a bucket, and moving the crushed rock to a tailings pile. Each dedicated quadrant of the dig had its own tailings pile (1x1x1M of rock had its own pile) in case a pice of fragment was lost. I know that low cost survey Lidar will really help, and that RTK GPS is also improving things. On larger digs, documentation with drones is also likely to produce better incremental tracking of progress. But, for this to be better, improving the actual digging is still a big unsolved problem. EDIT: the other 50% of our time was: 40% reassembling bones with superglue in an air conditioned room. (pleasant for the temperature, but maddeningly frustrating work) 10% dig notation, journaling, discussion, planning, survey, etc.
- Splendor 9y agoThere's ground-penetrating_radar but that just helps you know where to toil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar
- mturmon 9y agoHmm, turns out there is a whole wiki page devoted to that and other methodologies for archaeological surveying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophysical_survey_(archaeology)#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophysical_survey_(archaeolog...
- galago 9y agoNon-invasive technologies are super-cool because we may not actually want to disturb stuff until we have the technology to do it properly. Some stuff we may never want to disturb for cultural or other reasons.
- hoppa_liza 9y agoJust stressing the "other reasons" part. In some countries people actually advocate for leaving stuff like this buried for fear of corrupt gov. officials handing off what they find to smugglers.
- amelius 9y agotaking lots of images + mechanical turk?
- ssttoo 9y agoAlso one of the last professions to be automated in the future because of complexity/specialization vs monetary benefit :)
- kyberias 9y agoPaleontologists in this case.
- gvd 9y agoIt's called post docs
- ohazi 9y ago> or require less human toiling? post-docs are humans too...
- eric_the_read 9y agotechnically, yes...
- perseusprime11 9y agoWell... It depends...
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoThere was recently a segment on 60 Minutes about using satellite data, such has been very effective in some cases: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/space-archaeology-transforms-how-ancient-sites-are-discovered/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/space-archaeology-transforms-how...
- whitingx 9y ago> have there ever been any advances in this field to make the process go faster Speed Archaeology! https://youtu.be/m11VH-dUPEk https://youtu.be/m11VH-dUPEk ;)