Seandálaíocht - Irish for Archaeology

I spent yesterday researching and organising things for Smelt 2010 which is fast creeping up on me. One of the fancy things I'd like to do for the smelt is some time-lapse photography so I devoted a bit of time to figuring out how my still relatively new digital slr works; familiarising myself a bit more with terms like apeture, shutter-speed and ISO. The result is a test video of me working for a couple of hours in my little home office: 

It reveals a weird tendency to play with my beard (shared by all bearded men i'd imagine) and a dangerous sedentism that reminds me how much exercise I don't do. 

Besides that, preparations are coming along and the Smelt will go ahead on the 6th and 7th of March. The one big thing I need to sort out is a bellows system, which I will make if need s be but I would be more than happy to borrow if someone would like to donate!

For people who would like to come to see the smelt (taking place in the Irish National Heritage Park in Co. Wexford) the schedule will hopefully run as follows: 

Friday 5th - I'll be there prepping and setting up the smelting area and probably starting construction of the furnace
Saturday 6th - Completion of furnace and pre-firing with wood. Ore preparation and roasting. 
Sunday 7th - The smelt (volunteers needed!)
Monday 8th - Clean up

All are welcome to come but if you can't make it I will be putting up videos and images from the smelt on the project's website.

Ok, so I correctly identified WOGE 80 over at the Moore Group blog so I get to pick the next site. The idea is you have to identify the site in the picture below and its major period of occupation. If you know it, post a comment and then you get to host WOGE 82.

You can follow the game on facebook.

Q: What is When on Google Earth?
A: It’s a game for archaeologists, or anybody else willing to have a go!

Q: How do you play it?
A: Simple, you try to identify the site in the picture.

Q: Who wins?
A: The first person to correctly identify the site, including its major period of occupation, wins the game.

Q: What does the winner get?
A: The winner gets bragging rights and the chance to host the next When on Google Earth on his/her own blog!

Be the first to correctly identify the site below and its major period of occupation in the comments below and you can host your own!

After a little thinking I have decided to seperate off my C.V. and publications to my personal site. 

I think this makes more sense as the casual visitor to the Seandalaiocht site generally has no interest in my employment history. It'll also give me a bit of space and - now it's done - some time to fix up the links, video and image sections.  

If all those head-hunters out there are looking for more info on me I'd prefer its all on one clean site free of rants and ramblings. This may mean some broken links to files and pages on Seandalaiocht in the short term but I'll fix them as I find 'em. 

Readers may be interested in a brilliant opportunity to get involved in a project reconstructing a large currach based on the Boyne-type currachs used up until the twentieth century. 

This summer the project will be experimenting with methods of transporting stone based on theoretical ideas about how stone was transported from various places on the east coast of Ireland to Newgrange and there are further plans for next year. The film company Crossing the Line Films is involved on the project. They were previously involved in the extremely professional production of  Blood of the Irish. 

I was involved in a similar project based in Denmark which resulted in the sailing of a reconstructed viking ship called the Sea Stallion from Roskilde to Dublin and back. I can highly recommend it and if I can find the time I might get involved myself.

I'd strongly advise a look at the superb website and encourage people to get involved in a project that represents an exceedingly rare opportunity.

A new series of the UTV programme Hidden Heritage has started recently and is available from the UTV Player. You can read summaries of the four episodes here and catch the first one for the next month here. 

From a brief look at the first episode it seems to have some good interviews with some familiar faces. It covers old ground but in an interesting way for the short format. Well worth a look. 

Head on over to charcoal.seandalaiocht.com and read the update on a recent experimental charcoal production experiment I was involved in with Niall Kenny. We attempted to reconstruct and early medieval pit kiln from Russagh 4 and a mound kiln too with mixed results.

There's a summary blog post on the site now but we'll be adding more images and eventually a video to the site as we get time. Niall is going to have another go at charcoal making at Smelt 2010 and hopefully with the lessons we've learned from this experiment it will be a big success.

Last month I noticed a very flattering note on the Eachtra website about myself and this site. It invites comment from me but unfortunately I can't see anywhere to comment on their website so I decided I might just waffle away here as usual.

The title of the Eachtra post was "Brian Dolan + Web 2.0 = www.seandlaiocht.com". While being aware of the concept of Web 2.0 I had never previously thought about it in relation to myself or to archaeology.So what is Web 2.0?

Well, its difficult to say and I'm not going into the details, that's what wikipedia is for, but basically its a way of describing a theoretical 'new version' of the internet. To me at least, its talking about an internet that isn't just consumed by everybody but can be easily created and changed without esoteric knowledge about Java, C++, html or any number of other scary abbreviations that are almost meaningless to the majority of the non Star Trek loving population of the planet (not that I have any problem with Star Trek).  

Essentially it's sites like YouTube, Facebook and and Flickr which allow you to interact with the web, create your own space and interact with other people online. Sites like Weebly (the service I use to publish this blog) and Google Apps allow web publication without ANY programming knowledge. Basically if you can use a word processor you can now have a presence on the net. 

So what has Web 2.0 got to do with archaeology? Well, so much and at the same time so little. Its all about potential and a few sites (including Eachtra's with its excellent online journal , nominated for an Irish Web Award in 2009 btw) have begun to embrace it and change the way people interact with archaeological information, data and research.

Web 2.0 has huge potential to change the way archaeology is viewed in Ireland. Dissemination has been one of the buzzwords in the discipline for the last five years but I have heard little talk about how the internet can transform how we disseminate to the public. The potential to reach out to the public, to inform and, excitingly, to interact is gigantic.

Irish archaeology's response to the internet has been mixed. Some interesting and useful steps have been taken with online bibliographies, databases and mapping (e.g. Archaeology.ie, Excavations.ie, EMAP) but these are generally aimed at those already interested and they aren't exactly user friendly. Many commercial sites provide summaries of excavations, some make reports available and one even has a blog (not that it is much used). However there are plenty of very basic commercial sites out there and some of the archaeology pages on the internet I most use (Thadeus Breen's and Conor McDermott's sites)  are still decidedly web 1.0.. Academia has done little more and the University webpages are nothing if not boring. Where are the academic blogs? The rich video and audio content or the electronic publications?

In reality it has been left to enthusiast sites such as Megalithomania and Mythical Ireland to 'give the people what they want'; including detailed maps of sites, basic information (sometimes not as accurate or up to date as it could be but where are the professionals providing info?), videos, photos and lots of other content.

Hopefully I'm not coming over too preachy and I am aware that this site and its subdomains (smelt.seandalaiocht.com and charcoal.seandalaiocht.com) are by no means perfect but they do show some of what is possible with no programming knowledge, practically no money and a bit of time. Future plans for the site include a database of Irish iron sites based on my PhD research, an interactive map of the same and more articles, presentations, videos and photos. There is nothing stopping any other archaeologist starting a site and sharing a little of what they know and are interested in with the public who ultimately pay their wages (or, more likely these days, their dole!). 

The move to better websites in Irish archaeology is already noticeable with the trend for almost every INSTAR project to have a website (for a list see here) and the recently updated Discovery Programme pages.  However we can do more. Sites like Scribd and Issuu make it free to publish online; Google and Bing's mapping services offer the potential to create accessible geospatial data at no cost; and Youtube and Vimeo do the same for the distribution of video and audio.

Lectures and books are not the only way to tell people about archaeology. We don't need to make it more interesting, we all know its already fascinating, but it would do no harm to make it all a little bit easier for the man on the street. Call it benevolent self-interest: the more people get interested in archaeology and value it, the more chance they'll be happy to fund it.

I found out about a newly discovered Viking house located behind the Four Courts in Dublin (Hammond Lane/Church Street) at the weekend through a friend working on the site but it has now trickled through to the national news. It was featured on Morning Ireland yesterday morning through a five minute interview with Margaret Gowen, complete with obligatory northside/southside comment at the end. You can listen to it on their podcast of the whole programme or just the interview below:

As a bonus, you can also see the report broadcast on the six-one news by clicking here or watch the whole programme on the RTE Player (skip to about 37 minutes in for the juicy bit). Also an Irish Times article here.