Only slightly jaded by the after effects of the reception at the Foreign Office, Antiquists were surprisingly well represented at 9am this morning. I sat in on the Shipwreck 3D session and was impressed by Toby Jones’ account of 3D timber recording on the Newport Ship. It seems £30k gets you a Faro arm, a copy of Rhino and a beast of a 40″ monitor. Looked like an ideal setup for this kind of work. The Newport team report accuracies of 0.25mm on individual measurements and can digitise up to 3.5m of timber length per day.
Chris Rowland of Dundee University showed some stunning images of WWI and II battleships created from high resolution, multibeam sonar data collected using the Independent Sonar Head Attitude and Positioning (ISHAP) developed by ADUS . Chris’ background in the entertainment industry was in clear evidence. His HD animation backed with an ambient soundtrack was one of the most engaging renders I’ve ever seen. His team have also written a viewer for rendered point cloud data-sets written in OpenGL which almost certainly has wider applications.
My third highlight for the day was a detailed look at the use of GPR and magnetometry in rescue archaeology in Sweden. Sorry but I can’t be sure if it was Lars-Inge Larson or Immo Trinks from the Swedish National Heritage Board but the presentation showed the value of the iterative use of GPR to provide wider context for excavations limited to areas of direct impact. A surprising figure that was offered was that even in such intensive use, geophysics only accounted for 3% of project budgets - including depreciation on equipment! Made me wonder if the economics of archaeology are a little different in Sweden.
