I’ve recently taken on a 4th year Interdisciplinary Studies student for his honours thesis. He’s interested in social aspects of drinking in the Aegean Bronze Age. It’s been a while since I’ve dabbled in the Aegean, but this should be an interesting experience. Zack’s research blog may be followed here. If you have an interest in the area/subject, feel free to follow along. I think I’ll post about my perspective on Zack’s research from time to time – hence the title of this post. But as Ethan Watrall tweeted, there are of course privacy concerns. So I’ll limit myself to big-picture idea type posts.

One of Zack’s interests is in digital approaches to archaeology. We want the tools/methods to suit the questions (or be able to shed new light on old questions), so we’re reading around some digital work in Classics and Archaeology, for inspiration:

1. Alison Babeau, “Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day”: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classicists, 2011., http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub150abst.html
2. Shawn Graham and James Steiner, “TravellerSim: Growing Settlement Structures and Territories with Agent-Based Modeling,” in Digital Discovery: Exploring New Frontiers in Human Heritage. CAA 2006. Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Proceedings of the 34th Conference, Fargo, United States, April 2006 (Archaeolingua, 2007). http://carleton-ca.academia.edu/SMGraham/Papers/602641/TravellerSim_Growing_Settlement_Structures_and_Territories_with_Agent-Based_Modeling_full_text
3. Eirc Kansa; Kansa, Sarah Whitcher; & Watrall, Ethan. (2011). Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration Location: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1r6137tb
4. Tom Brughmans 2010 “Connecting the Dots: Towards Archaeological Network Analysis” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 29.3 277-303. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0092.2010.00349.x/full
5. Rob Witcher, 1999. GIS and Landscapes of Perception. In Geographical Information Systems and Landscape Archaeology. Gillings, M., Mattingly, D. & van Dalen, J. Oxford: Oxbow. Mediterranean Landscape Archaeology 3: 13-22. (View publication online)
6. Rob Witcher, (Re)surveying Mediterranean Rural Landscapes: GIS and Legacy Survey Data Internet Archaeology 24 http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue24/witcher_index.htm

Should be a lot of fun.

We’re setting up a digital workflow. I’m asking Zack to blog about his research – what he’s reading, the questions those readings raise, the problems he encounters. By getting into the habit of writing in small chunks frequently, my hope is that he’ll be able to pull together substantial pieces for the eventual submission. Each chunk can then be arranged/tweaked in Scrivener, until we’re happy with the logic and flow. With Zotero to manage bibliography and Evernote to keep track of ideas/thoughts/interesting tidbits, Zack will learn how to get the most out of his research process.