Ancient History Ramblings

Cyprus Conference in PA

A recent announcement was sent out about an upcoming conference on Cyprus to be held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum March 27-29, 2009 - "The Ancient Kourion Area: Penn Museum's Legacy and Recent Research in Cyprus: A Conference Commemorating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Museum's Expedition." I did not realize that this would be the first scholarly conference held on Cyprus in 20 years. I am excited about being able to attend this since I am only about 4 1/2 hours away by car. Even though, the drawback is that I have used up all of my IUP travel money on the AIAC conference back in September.

RSM

Marble Head

It seems that archaeologists in Israel have been making a series of interesting discoveries. Recently, a marble head of a boxer was discovered at an archaeological excavation in Jerusalem. The head, which is 6 X 4 centimeters, dates to the 2nd or 3rd century AD and is very detailed. Archaeologists feel that no other marble artifact of a boxer has been discovered in the country. This is the same site at which archaeologists  last month discovered a cache of 264 gold coins dated to the 7th century. 

RSM

Horizon Report

A version of the 2009 Horizon Report is now available for viewing on the web. For those unfamiliar with the Horizon Report, the description posted on their website says::

• The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.

It is quite interesting to see the list of what they feel are 6 emerging technologies that will make their way into mainstream use over the next few years:

• Mobiles (1 year or less)
• Cloud Computing (1 year or less)
• Geo -Everything (2-3 years)
• the Personal Web (2-3 years)
• Semantic-Aware applications (4-5 years)
• Smart Objects (4-5 years)

RSM

Digital Reconstruction of Karnak

The Experimental Technologies Center at UCLA has created a digital reconstruction of the Karnak Temple Complex in Egypt - The Digital Karnak Project. There are several interesting features to the site. There is a section (Timemap Karnak) where you can jump to different periods and see how the complex changed. There is another section (Experience Karnak) that has thematic videos and instructional texts. There is also a section that explains how to use Google Earth to view the temple complex. The final section allows you to browse their archive to see photos and browse architectural features and topics. The site is very well-done and very informative. It is very easy to send quite a bit of time browsing the different sections of the website.

RSM

E-Book Readers

I have been reading lots of articles about E-Book readers since I would like to be able to make a convincing argument for buying one, without getting in trouble with my wife. A recent article on The Wired Campus shoots down one of my planned arguments, that since schools will be using them to deliver textbooks to students, I need to familiarize myself with them and should try to stay up on current technology. Northwest Missouri State University tried this with the Sony e-book readers and found that the lack of interactivity hurt their usage in the classroom. This makes sense to me, in their current state they lack interactivity and function identical to traditional books, and so would not appeal to students more than a regular textbook. It does not, however, help me justify getting one. Maybe when the new Kindle 2.0 arrives, I can talk my way into getting one.....we'll see.

RSM

Cyprus, Rain, and Waterpark?

As we start to prepare for the 2009 fieldseason, Cyprus starts to intrude on my thoughts more often. One thing I do to prepare for the summer is to start reading the Cyprus news online. At the AIA last weekend, I talked to several Cypriots who were happy that it had been raining quite a bit over the last few weeks. This is good news since the drought on the island was fairly bad last summer. The Cyprus Mail reports that the water levels in the reservoirs are only about half of what they were last year at this time and that despite the recent rains, it will take several more downpours to help out.

After reading about the rainfall situation, I then happened upon an article about a group of Russian investors looking to develop an amusement park on the island. It was quite interesting to read since they will be building a 5 star hotel, with theatres, a waterpark, a mall, and even a place to watch reenactments of the Battle of Salamis. This new site would be open by 2012 ad bring in an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 visitors a day.  It was actually amusing to imagine this until I got to the part where the article mentioned where the proposed building site was going to be.................PYLA. This totally freaked me out. If this is true, what will this mean for the Pyla-Koutsopetria project? Sure, we can relax after a hard day's work at the waterpark or dine at fancy restaurants, but what will this mean for the development of the area? This certainly underscores the importance of our work in the area and reinforces to me the importance of expanding our survey area before development of the area increases.

RSM

Ancient History Blogs and the AIA

Wow, this semester has hit me hard, and it seems that I already have no time. I returned from the AIA on Sunday and classes began Monday morning. The AIA provided me the opportunity to talk to some people I haven't talked to in a while. The poster session went pretty well, except for once again realizing that standing next to a poster for 4 hours is tiring, boring, and tiring. I was glad to hear others, especially younger people, comment on how tiring standing in one place can be. On the PKAP front, it was very productive. We had several meetings with different groups of people as we planned for the summer. It seems that this year the project is going to involve more than 30 people and I actually feel pretty good about the upcoming season, even with the continued expansion of the project. Each year we get a little better at planning and logistics - showing that practice makes perfect. In addition to the traditional fieldwork, we also have some possibilities for a couple of new digital projects, as we explore them, I'll share them with you. One final note, I recently learned about a site that a has a pretty lengthy list of ancient history blogs - the Learn-gasm page has an entry that lists the Top 50 Ancient History Blogs.

RSM

Off to the AIA

Tomorrow I leave for the AIA (Archaeological Institute of America's Annual Meeting). Just like last year, I did a poster on PKAP. This year, fortunately, I was able to create the poster without much trouble, both in the design phase and in the printing phase. That must mean the poster is not very good. Last year the judges thought I had too much text and so this year I eliminated almost all my text. It will be interesting to see if my feedback this year is that I need to include more text.

RSM

Last week before Semester

It is the last week before my semester begins so I am frantically trying to get ready. It is always amazing how quickly time flies over the holidays. Two items that caught my attention in the news:

• On the digital front, there is a Twitter phishing scam circulating through Twitter designed to steal login information. It is evidently working well enough that someone was able to hack into CNN anchor Rick Sanchez's Twitter account and post a false message.
• On the ancient history front there was an article about a 3rd century Roman battlefield discovered near Hanover Germany.

RSM

Satellite Photos and Archaeology

Cnn.com has an article on the use of satellite photos for locating ancient sites ("Satellites unearthing ancient Egyptian ruins") in its technology section. While this is not exactly earth shattering news, there have been several articles in the last year on the subject and I have heard conference papers talking about their use - especially Google Earth, I am excited about this for PKAP. One of our former fieldwalkers, who is now a graduate student, recently received a grant for the purchase of some satellite imagery of the PKAP survey area. It will be interesting to see what she is able to do with it, since this is an avenue I have been interested in pursuing, but have lacked the funds to purchase the imagery. I did purchase some old satellite imagery of our area a few years ago, but it was not very helpful. This has more promise.

RSM