Week III

In my third week at Gabii I spent three days in the field excavating, one day in our finds lab and one day working with our topography team aka "topo". As not everyone is given the opportunity to work with topo for the sake of time, I will be outlining my experience in this blog post.

Our topography team at Gabii is responsible for recording our SUs through visual representations. Essentially, through measuring the elevation of an SU and creating polygons to represent SU shapes, we can form maps true to site. The total station is the stationary component of measuring the SU an elevation points; it fires a laser to the prism, which reflects the light back to the total station. This enables the station to record where the prism is in three dimensions. The prism is moved throughout the day around given SUs documenting points for which the team will connect-the-dots.

Tyler taking the SU points of a cut with the prism.

Before starting the day in topo, Tyler and Emmanuele set up the total stations owned by the University of Michigan. This process involves lining up the total station and prism at fixed points in space. Aligning the total station and prism on site is the most crucial step because it will allow the team to represent SUs in relation to each other. Since we take SU points every day, we need to ensure our data accurately represents the distance and elevation of every previous SU in space, and aligning the total station and prism at fixed points guarantees this phenomenon within a small margin of error.

Emmanuele supervising the alignment of the total station to the prism.

The first step in recording involves a photo model by Matt Naglak. From one physical location, Matt will take photographs of several different angles of an SU before moving to a different aspect entirely. In doing this, Matt is able to create a three dimensional photograph of an SU to be viewed virtually. Ultimately, the photographs can be stitched together to recreate a visual representation of a given area at a specific point in time.

Outlining the SUs with points from the prism completes the process in order to give our photo models significance in space. When Matt's photo models are joined with points from the prism, the data can be entered into a gaming system called Unity. This allows archaeologists to virtually explore the site of Gabii freely back in North America. Additionally, the interface allows for the user to excavate SUs virtually with excavation descriptions to better understand the stratigraphy.

While most of us still don't fully understand the physics behind topography, I think the Gabii workforce would agree that topo's work is not only very cool, but will be incredibly useful for future scholars of the site.