@joeroe@archaeo.social
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joeroe

@joeroe@archaeo.social

Researcher in computational archaeology at https://mastodon.online/@unibern. https://archaeo.social admin. Wikipedian.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

KFuentesGeorge, (edited ) to Archaeology

My "favourite" thing about this study is the part where achaeologists who found hunting tools/weapons in women's graves assumed they were kitchen implements.

Like, "well Hans, in this woman's grave, we found what inscriptions at the time have named the Flail of Vengeance. As of right now, we are not sure to what culinary task this tool was turned, but conjecture that it was possibly the preparation of small pies."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i

joeroe,
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@afreytes @blogdiva @KFuentesGeorge This is where that theory comes from, if your interested: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/204491, https://web.archive.org/web/20170810082947/https://mymission.lamission.edu/userdata/schustm/docs/VenusFigurines-WomensPerspective_HIGHLIGHTED.pdf

clmorgan, to Archaeology
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Can't help but feel a bit gutted that many folks seem to be massing on bluesky. It's more oligarchy-ware guys!! sigh.

joeroe,
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@clmorgan Was a bit of a wake up call for me that for many (most?) colleagues, the decline of Twitter was just a thing out that happened, or just Elon's fault, rather than a sign of any deeper problems with the model.

joeroe, to random
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Just saw a grant boosted here that demanded the recipient produce at least one peer-reviewed paper, participate in a conference and 16 smaller meetings/workshops, write public engagement material, and work part-time for the organisation... for the equivalent of 2-3 months postdoc salary.

Don't boost this stuff, call it out! This isn't "every little helps". They could have created a decently-paid and decent length fellowship for one person, instead of precarity for a dozen.

joeroe, to Archaeology
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Digital Archaeology Bern – Ancient West Asia (#DABAWA) begins today at 13.00 (UTC+2): https://dabawa.hypotheses.org/

#Archaeology #DigitalHumanities

joeroe,
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The first session is on eGlyptics and the first speaker was Elisa Roßberger, presenting her work on cylinder seals in the "Annotated Corpus of Ancient West Asian Imagery" (ACAWAI-CS).

ACAWAI-CS includes 18,000 (!!!) seals. It uses a CIDOC-CRM-based ontology to describe their rich iconography, using semantic triples and a controlled vocabulary. It is capable of semi-automated annotation, and they've already processed an 60% of their corpus.

joeroe,
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Next up was Eythan Levy on his , the Artifacts Analyzer (https://github.com/Eythan31/Artifacts-Analyzer), a tool for quickly generating cross-tabulations from complex archaeological databases.

Eythan gave us the example of using it to classify Iron Age Hebrew seals in his database, based on the cross-correlation of their semantic contents.

The tool recently got a graphical interface, so check it out!

joeroe,
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Stefan Münger presented his project, "Stamp seals from the Southern Levant" (https://cssl.levantineseals.org), a digitisation and continuation of Othmar Keel's monumental corpus of Levantine stamp seals.

The challenges in implementing such a database included handling and standardising the large number (60+) of parameters for each object, building expressions of uncertainty into the ontology, and enriching free text fields with semantic information.

joeroe,
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As a side note, both Elisa and Stefan mentioned that parts of their interface were "a bit like Wikipedia". I often think the same when trying to scope features of https://xronos.ch. Clearly we've got some common points of inspiration!

Which is ironic, given how often Wikipedians complain about the interface...

joeroe,
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@failedLyndonLaRouchite I've used wikitext almost daily for my entire adult life... and I totally agree, it's a terrible markup language.

joeroe,
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The next session is on databases and research environments.

Mareke Johanne Ubben and colleagues discussed data management at the DAI in Istanbul.

Their systems have to handle data from several large field projects across Turkey. But they're able to make use of the DAI's excellent in-house, open source software, including https://field.idai.world/ and https://idai.world.

joeroe,
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Miller Prosser and Andrew Wright presented the Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment (OCHRE, https://voices.uchicago.edu/ochre/).

OCHRE has a graph-based, schema-agnostic ontology with a high level of atomisation. This allows it to accommodate a wide variety of philological and ecological data without making too many assumptions, and complex queries.

They also mentioned a cool new initiative for digital data publishing: https://onlinepublications.uchicago.edu/

joeroe, (edited )
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To end the day, the keynote speaker Adam Anderson presented an ontology for cuneiform artefacts.

He showed how Midjourney can produce... interesting renditions of ancient architecture like the Ishtar gate, but is hopeless if asked to reproduce cuneiform text.

How can we teach AI cuneiform?

With an ontology! FactGrid's cuneiform ontology is implemented in #Wikibase. It maps inscriptions directly to cuneiform characters in #Wikidata, not transcriptions.

#DABAWA #Archaeology #DigitalHumanities

joeroe, (edited )
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The idea is to facilitate AIs eventually learning to translate cuneiform texts.

On top of this, FactGrid encodes semantic information (people, places, dates, titles, etc.) and metadata (archive, script, language, etc.)

It also has an ontology for the source material for all this data, which can be used to study citation networks, do topic mapping, and so on.

You can find FactGrid's cuneiform project here: https://database.factgrid.de/wiki/FactGrid:Cuneiform_Project

joeroe,
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That's it for today. continues tomorrow morning.

This is the first time I've tried live-tooting a conference on Mastodon. Let me know if you're getting anything out of it!

joeroe,
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We resume today with Sophie Marxer, who presented a network analysis of Hellenistic pottery from Cilicia.

She uses Nodegoat (https://nodegoat.net), free network analysis software supported by the University of Bern.

This is the first time I've seen network analysis used to produce a typology, which seems to work quite well. It also facilitates regional comparisons of pottery classifications and generating chronological sequences.

joeroe,
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Next Silvana Hunger and colleagues talked about their work on the Sirkeli Höyük archives.

The tackled a huge paper archive generated by decades of excavations. The finds from excavations in the 90s are lost, so in many cases this documentation is the only record.

They're in the process of scanning and digitising all this, and adding it to the FileMaker database used by the ongoing excavations. Ultimately it will be deposited in a long-term repository.

joeroe,
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I was next up, presenting computational models of the range of wild plants and crop progenitors in prehistoric West Asia.

You can find my slides (with notes) at https://github.com/joeroe/dabawa23_enm and https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/701654991

joeroe,
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Unfortunately I couldn't make the last two talks of the morning, by Evgenia Filimonov et al. and Isabelle Marthot-Santaniello. But their abstracts are here:

https://dabawa.hypotheses.org/?p=736
https://dabawa.hypotheses.org/?p=779

joeroe,
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After lunch Domizia Paolucci and Nicola Lanzaro kicked off the "geography and travel" session with a route analysis of the steppe/desert zone of the Southern Levant (my favourite part of the world ❤️).

Their work incorporates these neglected areas into the interaction and trade networks of the Mediterranean region. Jawa was perhaps the "gateway to the desert". They used least cost path analysis, cross-validated with the known (later) Roman roads.

joeroe,
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Sebastian Borkowski took us back to network analysis with Nodegoat (https://nodegoat.net), which he uses to match hydronyms known from Ur III texts the reconstructed waterways of Southern Mesopotamia.

His network model shows how cities had their own distinct hinterlands of named waterways, with only a handful named in multiple archives (mostly canals).

Nodegoat is getting a great showing at this conference. It seems like an extremely flexible tool.

joeroe,
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Elias Zimmermann gave the final talk of the conference, a little bit of a palette cleanser, taking us from the Bronze Age to the 1930s and Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach's accounts of archaelogical expeditions in West Asia.

PCI_Archaeology, to random French
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I just made a small donation archaeo.social. It's almost nothing, but if every user makes this it will be funded easily. Here is the link to do so: https://opencollective.com/archaeosocial

joeroe,
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@PCI_Archaeology Much appreciated :)

And you're absolutely right, our costs are low, so we really don't need that many regular backers for long-term sustainability.

joeroe, to Archaeology
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Call for papers: 2023, Turin & online, 12–13 December. https://www.archeofoss.org/2023/call-for-papers

@zackbatist and I are organising a panel on in the which, if you're reading this, you probably have thoughts about! We would love to hear critical and creative reflections on our https://archaeo.social project, archaeology on Mastodon, or the future of scholarly social media in our field more generally.

Submission deadline 20 October.

haritulsidas, to languagelearning
@haritulsidas@masto.ai avatar

Archaeologists have discovered a new language in the ruins of an ancient empire in Turkey. This language, called Luwian, was used by the people of the Hittite Empire, which collapsed around 1200 BC. The discovery could shed light on the history and culture of this mysterious civilization, which once ruled over much of Anatolia and the Near East.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a45304938/new-language-discovered-ruins-ancient-empire/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=HariTulsidas%2Fmagazine%2FMind+and+Matter

joeroe,
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The new language is being called Kalašma or Kalašmaic. We've known about and been able to read Luwian for decades.

Archasa, to random

Fantastic that the instance archaeo.social is updated to the latest version of mastodon, allowing for TEXT SEARCH of posts by myself and others, should we chose to.
I have been craving this function to be able to find more people to follow, not just those including a #
Went straight to Preferences and clicked the function "Include public posts in search results".
👏👏👏💐🥳🙏💐

joeroe,
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@Archasa Just a heads up, we (that is, https://archaeo.social) had to build a search index from scratch for this update and that is... taking some time. It might be a day or so until the search results you see are fully complete.

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