Category: Archaeology
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Neolithic Breton-Style Rock Art at Boscawen-ûn Stone Circle
in ArchaeologyToday members of the Cornwall Archaeological Society will have received copies of the latest newsletter. I didn’t expect to be featured on the front page! Below is the text from the newsletter which I wrote after an intensive couple of days research in the Society of Antiquaries library. A Reinterpretation of the Rock Art at Boscawen-ûn…
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A busy summer
in ArchaeologyI haven’t blogged since March, and since I have some data processing in the background and can do little else while I wait, I thought I’d post a little update. I have been working for most of the week with Azook, rebuilding cornishmemory.com, the web front-end to their Re:collect digital archive of historic photographs, films…
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Interactive 3D Models on Sketchfab
Publishing 3D models online used to be a pain. It always relied upon plugins, and the results could never be very detailed. Sketchfab has changed all of that, and made publishing beautifully detailed 3D models a breeze. You could use the analogy that Sketchfab is a kind of YouTube for 3D models. It is also…
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Recording St Piran’s Oratory – 3D model and animation
in ArchaeologyI 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…
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Medieval Chapel Killed My Laptop
in ArchaeologySince 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…
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It’s All About The Photos
in ArchaeologyIt’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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…