Freelance consultant for digital heritage

Category: Archaeology

  • Recording St Piran’s Oratory – 3D model and animation

    I have now completed my recent work on St Piran’s Oratory on behalf of St Piran Trust and Cornwall Archaeological Unit. It was a challenging task requiring a huge amount of computer resources and time, with colleagues at Archaeovision helping when my computer broke down, but I am pleased with the results. Here is a short…

  • Medieval Chapel Killed My Laptop

    Since November I have been working on 3D capture data from St Piran’s Oratory. It has taken a long time to process the 3D photogrammetry data as it is a hugely complex task to record every stone. This process caused the untimely demise of my 5 year old MacBook Pro, which was struggling anyway. It’s…

  • It’s All About The Photos

    It’s been a busy time for me recently, with much of my recent work focussing upon historic photographs and photogrammetry. I have been working with the Morrab Library in Penzance to build a digitisation facility so that they may begin, with a volunteer workforce, to scan their wonderful collection of historic photographs. There are about…

  • 3D Excavation Snapshot – St Piran’s Oratory in March 2014

    Earlier this year (2014), I was asked to record a rather unglamourous pile of concrete rubble. It was within the boundary of a Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM), and for health and safety reasons – very good ones – needed to be removed to allow the re-excavation of the medieval St Piran’s Oratory to continue.

  • The resurgence of archaeology podcasting?

    Years ago I used to record an archaeology podcast, imaginatively named “Archaeocast” for Wessex Archaeology. Not many episodes were recorded (17ish) but it was very popular, garnering over 800,000 downloads as of early 2012. It’s probably more than a million now. It was the world’s first archaeology podcast, and even made the iTunes charts at…

  • Carwynnen Quoit

    Earlier this year I was commissioned by Sustrust to digitally reconstruct the then-collapsed Carwynnen Quoit, a neolithic dolmen, using existing 3D laser scan data. This would be used to inform the physical reconstruction of the monument. I was also asked to investigate and report on a number of stones adjacent to the quoit which were…

  • The Mermaid of Zennor – a low-fi 3D scan

    At the weekend I had the chance to visit the church of St Senara in Zennor, Cornwall. I spent some time looking at the wonderful medieval carving of the famous mermaid. Despite not having my Canon DSLR with me, I decided to take a series of photos with my iPhone 4S (8MP) with the view…

  • Recording St Piran’s Oratory

    For the last couple of weeks, and on St Piran’s Day itself, I have been helping out with the Uncovering St Piran’s Oratory project. Organised by St Piran Trust and run by Cornwall Council Historic Environment Service the project aims to uncover as much of the (potentially) early medieval structure to assess and record its condition.…

  • Announcing Archaeovision

    I am delighted to announce that I am now a consultant for Archaeovision, a pan-EU group of experts in the field of archaeological computing. Here’s a summary of what Archaeovision is about: Archaeovision offers innovative solutions to a wealth of problems in the heritage sectors. We can 3D scan your objects, survey your building, investigate…

  • Jelly and Archaeology

    “Let’s help each other” Yesterday saw the official unveiling of Jelly, an app for smartphones which allows users to ask questions, accompanied by a photo, to their extended social networks. Humanity is connected like never before. In fact, recent white papers have concluded that the proverbial “six degrees of separation” is now down to four…