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ACRG member moves to University of York

ACRG member, Gareth Beale, has been appointed as Research Fellow at the University of York. Gareth will be based at the Centre for Digital Heritage. In his post as Research Fellow, Gareth will manage and share the coordination of a new international collaboration in Digital Heritage between the Universities of York, Aarhus, Leiden and Uppsala. Continue reading →

Netley Abbey

In January of this year myself and Dan Joyce completed a series of recording techniques at Netley Abbey, including time of flight and phase scanning, photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging. The work was organised by Dan in collaboration with English Heritage for his individually negotiated topic for his masters degree. Continue reading →

Icons RTI case study

Icons: Production  techniques and examination methodology Icon or ikon from Greek eikōn is a representation of a sacred or sanctified Christian personage used in religious worship in the Russian or Greek Orthodox Church. The production of icons has been described by the monk Dionisios ek Fourna in 1728-1733. Icons are typically painted on a wooden panel with the egg tempera painting technique, over a layer of gypsum and glue (preparation layer). Continue reading →

ACRG at field-school in Estonia

Ten days ago three members of ACRG visited Estonia to participate at the archaeological field-school. It was organised by Marge Konsa from University of Tartu who also spent several months in Southampton as a visiting research student. Field-school took place in Lihula, a tiny village in West Estonia. County of Läänemaa is filled with great archaeology, so we could enjoy little of it as well. Continue reading →

Underwater RTI HMS Invincible

On February 19th,  1758 the HMS Invincible set sail out of Portsmouth Harbor for Canada to join the British fleet to fight the French.  Unfortunately, due to a domino effect of extraordinary bad luck, she ran aground on Horse Tail Sand not far from the harbor.  Invincible was a French ship launched in 1744 and captured by the British in 1747.  At that time the British out-number the French on the sea. Continue reading →

Underwater Reflectance Transformation Imaging…a success.

I’ve been working on Reflectance Transformation Image capture in a sub-aquatic environment.  On 2 May, 2013 the first ever PTM file from an RTI dataset captured entirely underwater was successfully processed in the Archaeological Computing Research Group computer lab at the University of Southampton using RTIBuilder software.   Images were captured in 1.5 meters of water at the campus Jubilee pool using a common 12mpix digital camera and a 15 watt 1000 lumen HID dive-light. Continue reading →

Southampton at the SAA Annual Meeting, Honolulu 3-7 April 2013

Recently, the department of archaeology at Southampton made its debut appearance at the Society for American Archaeology annual conference. This year it was due to be held in Honolulu, Hawai'i, which promised to make it one of the best-attended meetings of its kind. Besides the well-publicized size of the SAA meetings and the high esteem in which they are held, Honolulu is a desirable travel destination for very obvious reasons. Continue reading →

Testing a Prototype 3D Structure Light Imaging System for Underwater Archaeology

While 3D imaging has become a revolution in land archaeology, it has experienced a difficult baptism underwater. Electrical equipment and water do not mix, plus many systems do not easily transfer underwater when you add currents, visibility issues, and salt into the equation. Approaches that have been attempted include acoustics, laser-based systems, and photogrammetry with each of these having varying success depending on site conditions. Continue reading →

Capturing and exploring textures in National Archive

Some time ago we made a visit to UK National Archive with James Miles to test RTI technology on a wide range of examples provided by the National Archive. James went back in September of 2012 for a second time to do more recording. Recently Dinah Eastop, a Curatorial Research Fellow from the National Archives has written two blog posts and presented the results of the work on their blog. Continue reading →