Blog plans
May 24, 2009
During my spare time over the past week or two I have been fiddling with the layout for this blog to try to improve its overall appearance. I want a more customised blog that I can use as an online resource for students and others interested in Australian archaeology.
Unfortunately, Blogger is extremely restrictive with what you can do with it, at least for someone who - like me - has only a rudimentary knowledge of website design. I have another blog running wordpress, which overall is a better looking site that is much easier to work on. So, I have decided today to move from blogger to a wordpress installation under another domain name. I am weighing up whether to just create a new site and link to it from here, or to transfer my content to the new site (overall, much harder!). Decisions, decisions!
There are realistically only maybe a handful of posts here that I want to take with me, so at the moment I am leaning toward starting afresh. The site I am moving to is ausarch.com, which I purchased last year and I feel is a good option given where I want to direct my efforts with blogging. This site will remain here, I may use it more like a personal online resume rather than a blog; time will tell!
It is likely that I will have the new site running within a month, so in the meantime I will continue to post here about its development and progress!
Posted byMick Morrison at 12:25 PM 2 comments
Service announcement
May 12, 2009
Apologies for the unexpected break in transmission. Normal services will resume shortly.
Well things have been rather hectic here and I thought it important that I briefly explain why my feed of sporadic, semi-regular posts have completely dried up of late.
One word: PhD (ok, yes it's an acronym). I am trying to complete my doctoral thesis and submit this as soon as possible for examination, and to help with this I've taken a break from work and normal life and this - sadly - includes updating my blog. What is it about theses that tend to take up such a large proportion of one's energy and enthusiasm for writing? I think I need to finish before I can answer that question.
In any case, I will be back and will endeavour to follow up on the various series of posts I began before the intermission. I also have some interesting research projects on the agenda this year, mostly focussed on historical archaeological investigations of the various mission settlements at Weipa in Cape York. In the meantime, you can follow me on twitter @mickmorrison.
Posted byMick Morrison at 9:19 PM 0 comments
Free tool to assist with archaeological survey and sampling
March 04, 2009
Leszek at Free Geography Tools has written a brief post about using a freeware GIS tool (FGIS) that would be of some value for archaeos engaged in field sampling (on any scale). The tool allows you to create files containing either a series of random points or systematically spaced gridded points. Creating such files is a useful skill most archaeologists will need at some point: for example, I have used random and systematic points for field surveys (eg. to define centre points of areas to survey) or as part of a detailed recording or excavation sampling strategy (eg. to define 1 metre squares on large sites for detailed recording work).
The tool allows you to define a geographic area (polygon) that you would like to sample and then allows you to populate this with points. You can create a random or systematic (grid) distribution of points and can define both point spacing (for grids) or number of points (for random points). Resulting points can be saved as a shapefile, a common and mostly open GIS format as well as a few other formats.
Once you have your shapefile of points you can upload it to most GPS devices using DNRGarmin and similar Windows software, or GPSBabel for fellow Mac users. You can even covert it to display in Google Earth and print the resulting image with Lat/Long or UTM coordinates attributed to each point.
There are more advanced options for doing this with many commercial GIS applications but they're not free and therefore less accessible for students. This method also seems rather low-tech, and low-tech is king on fieldwork in my experience! Also, if you are not already a regular reader of Leszek's blog I highly recommend it as he writes about many useful tools for archaeos.
Links
Check out Leszek's post here.
DNR Garmin website
GPSBabel
FGIS
Posted byMick Morrison at 9:13 AM 0 comments
Labels: archaeological computing, field methods, Tips and tricks
Australian Archaeology Web Resources @ Ozarch
February 27, 2009
Gary Vines and the community of users at the Ozarch Google Group (previously posted about here) have developed a really handy list of Australian Archaeology web resources. It includes Government agencies, Indigenous organisations and other relevant resources and is quite a handy resource that can be accessed here. Group members can edit the document and add new links and resources to the list.
If you're not already a member of the Ozarch Group I highly recommend joining. It is moderated rather well, does not overload your email inbox and appears to be turning into quite a nice little web community.
Posted byMick Morrison at 10:55 AM 0 comments
Labels: Archaeology resources, around the web
History of Indigenous wellbeing at Weipa: part 1
February 17, 2009
I apologise for the slim offerings to be found here on my blog so far this year. By way of explanation (particularly for my regular readers!) I have had a touch of writers block due to an identity crisis regarding the overall purpose of my blog. To my mind, my blogging seems to have drifted a little away from archaeology and more into technology and gadgets which is not at all where I want to to take it. While relevant, I want to make that type of content more of an aside to posts that are principally about archaeology: it is after all supposed to be an archaeology blog. So in this post I thought I should get the ball rolling again, so to speak, by writing about a research project I am working on at Weipa in northern Australia. It will be split up over a few separate posts, with what follows simply serving as something of an introduction to the issues were are exploring.
Way back in 2005 I was in a meeting with a number of Elders from the Aboriginal community of Napranum (near Weipa). At that stage I was managing an Indigenous land and sea management program, so my role was to liaise with people about land management issues - which almost always came back to heritage management - and obtaining funding to do management oriented projects. Although we were supposed to be discussing weed management issues (a particularly exciting topic I might add), the conversation quickly drifted onto more interesting issues.
The Old Ladies I was meeting with had all grown up in the mission dormitories which, by all accounts, appears to have been a traumatising experience for many. Removed from their families at a very young age they were essentially locked in dormitories at night and were only able to see family on a fairly infrequent basis. Often their only substantive interaction with older kin was during camping trips out bush away from the mission. Along with the need to regularly attend church and school, they were also expected to work which the Presbyterian Mission superintendent considered to be a form of preparation for the practicalities of their adult lives. This meant domestic chores for girls and young women, and gardening and manual tasks for the boys and young men.
During our chat I scribbled down a few quick comments and wish now I had recorded the entire conversation. In particular, in talking about the original mission (which operated from 1898-1932) one of the women stated:
"they were healthier times (at Waypa). Waypandan, that is my mothers land. They ate wallaby, drank Nonda milk, collected ambanum [hairy yam], sugarbag, all those things. We need to tell people about those times"The quote was quite significant at the time because from earlier work in the area I was well aware of a widely held view at Weipa that bush foods (i.e. bush 'tucker') are considered more healthy than store bought foods. This is because many people associate getting bush foods and being on Country with a sense of health and wellbeing. Simply put, being on Country and eating bush food is good for you in all respects: socially, emotionally, physically, spiritually. In my view, the statement was important because it indicated that the Elders saw a link between history, learning about history, wellbeing and health. Looking at it now, I'm not so sure that this quote best demonstrates this point, but it was certainly the idea that I went away with that day. The other idea that those Old Ladies shared with me was that despite all of their bad experiences, people remember the 'mission days' as a period of comparative health and happiness compared with today. In short, 'they were healthier times' in the sense that health meant more than just physical health as such.
After that meeting it took a further few months of discussions with Elders to develop a research project. We entitled it 'they were healthier times: indigenous health and wellbeing within the Weipa Presbyterian Mission'. The broader project idea was to look at the history of Indigenous health and wellbeing (defined broadly as emotional, physical, social and spiritual health, after Anderson 1996) from an historical perspective. Simply put, our core question was: what was the nature of Indigenous wellbeing throughout the history of missions in the area and how is this relevent to the community today? The project also explores an important view held by community Elders: that younger people in the community do not 'know' the real history of their community, and that learning about this would in fact contribute to improving their wellbeing. This is because they associate a knowledge of history, culture and Country with improved health and wellbeing.
Our evolving project involves recording of oral history, Traditional Knowledge, archaeological surveys around key mission settlements and also work on historical documents. We obtained initial funding from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 2007 and from the Federal Government's Indigenous Heritage Program (IHP) in 2008 and began work on the project in early 2008. Since my original conversations with Elders and anthropologist Darlene McNaughton, several other people have become involved in the project including fellow archaeologist Justin Shiner and more recently historian Geoff Wharton.
Our results are preliminary at this stage, with our first concerted period of fieldwork mid 2008. In the next post I shall write about the original Weipa Mission site which operated from 1898-1932 and the results of archaeological and oral historical work we completed there last year. The photograph below was take in the early 1900s at this site.
 |
| From Weipa historical photos |
References:
Anderson, I. 1996. Aboriginal well-being. In C. Grbich (Ed.), Health in Australia: sociological concepts and issues (pp. 57-78). Sydney: Prentice Hall.
Posted byMick Morrison at 1:34 PM 0 comments
Labels: 'They were healthier times', cape york, contact archaeology, missions, weipa
Research tools and the web: finding and keeping track of references
February 01, 2009
Finding references: Google Scholar
Most people are familiar with Google Scholar, the search engine that retrieves information about research papers, books and so on. It can be incredibly useful, particularly if you are delving into a new field or research area and you quickly need to identify key sources. Scholar is reliant upon search engines having discovered a source in order for it to show up in your search results. Thus, if a source is not available on the web in the correct format then, logically, it does not show up in scholar search results and so searches on any particular topic might only return a small number of relevant sources available. Typically, there was a bias towards recent journal articles that were on the web.
This was once a real limitation to scholar's usefulness. However, during the past two or three years things have changed as more and more academic sources - both new and old - are being posted to the web. Today, scholar is a powerful tool that returns relatively comprehensive results in many subject areas. You can search for articles by author as well as those which are published within specific journals or in a particular date range; results can be directly imported into your bibliography software (see below). It has its limits though and the number one limitation in my view is scholar's inability to monitor your searches. At present it is not possible (easily and reliably at least) to monitor a particular search for new articles as they appear. For example, if I search for 'coastal archaeology' in December it would be useful for scholar to notify me when a new article appears in those search results in February.
If you've not used scholar for a while it is well worth revisiting. It is constantly improving and is (in my experience) the easiest way to quickly find relevant scholarly articles on the web today.
Zotero
(Zoh-TAIR-oh) is, in the words from their website, "a free, easy to use firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources". It is an open source project based out of George Mason University and is free to install and use without restrictions. It serves three main purposes:
- Collecting sources. Zotero uses bits of code called translators that allow you to import citation information from a website automatically. Many popular journal databases and major libraries have working translators and more are being actively developed. The result: you can visit many major sources of references, search and find what you are looking for and with one click import these into your Zotero bibliographic database. In other words, no more manual entry of citation information into your bibliographic software!
Major journal publishers such as Elsevier as well as Google Scholar, Amazon and many, many other websites are supported.
- Manage your sources. Zotero imports your references into a database file on your Mac or PC which is accessed by using your firefox web browser. You can create folder hierarchies (Zotero calls them 'collections') in which you can store your references. Once you have a source in Zotero you can add tags (keywords), enter notes, create links to any website (e.g. to reviews of a book) and attach a link to a local file or web document. Figure 1 below shows the browser interface.
- Cite sources and create bibliographies. This part of Zotero is important as it allows you to directly cite a source from your database in a document, and automatically create a bibliography of sources cited. I use Word 2008 on a Mac, which is not supported yet, however this function works on most other versions of word and on all versions of open office. You simply install a small add-on, select the reference you want to cite, and you're away.
With these sorts of options Zotero is emerging as a serious stable alternative to commercial bibliographic software such as Procite and Endnote. It's clean, fast, stable and customizable. It's web interface is its real strength. I use it mostly for importing references I find in google scholar: simply run a search on scholar, click the 'Save to Zotero' button and select the references to import.
Figure 1 - The Zotero interface
Citeulike
Citeulike is best compared to a social bookmarking utility for scholarly articles. Users create their own account and add articles to their library by using a small bookmarklet (a bookmark that opens a pop-up window - see Figure 2, below). This process is automatic for most major journal websites, and so once you find an article you simply click your bookmarklet and it is directly added to your library. Citeulike doesn't yet have the functionality of Zotero so for example, you can not automatically add references from Google Scholar to your library, however most major journal databases do work well.
Citeulike has other advantages that make it a crucial part of my work flow at the moment, mainly because it supports web feeds. All users have a web feed, meaning that others can subscribe to your feed and be notified when you add a new reference. You can also create and subscribe to feeds published by groups, for example I have created the group "Archaeology and Palaeoenvironments of the Australia-Pacific" which is open for anyone to join. Any members of this group will be automatically notified of new references added to the group's library. So, for me the great value of citeulike is that it makes it much easier to share references between people interested in similar areas.
So in summary, my web workflow consists of the following:
1) find references in scholar, citeulike or by browsing journal websites;
2) add my reference to citeulike OR zotero depending on which platform allows me to automatically import my reference;
3) download the article PDF to my computer;
4) export the citation from Zotero or citeulike into my local endnote library (one click);
5) attach the PDF to the endnote item; and finally,
6) read!
It may seem like a lengthy process but in most cases it takes me only 1-2 minutes to find, import and cite a new reference using these tools. Zotero is rapidly improving and will soon allow users to share libraries, thereby replacing much of the functionality of citeulike. Although for many using these sorts of tools may be quite new, they are typically very easy to use and can speed up the time it takes to find and manage your research sources.
I'd be interested to hear from others who use these or other tools or have suggestions for improving this system. You can do so in the comments below.
Links:
Google Scholar
Zotero
Citeulike
My citeulike library
Citeulike group: archaeology and palaeoenvironments of Australia and the Pacific
Posted byMick Morrison at 12:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: Archaeology resources, around the web, Tips and tricks
Ozarch on the road again!
January 08, 2009
The new list has been established via Google Groups which is much more flexible than a traditional email list-serve. You can elect to read posts on the web (like a forum), subscribe via the feed, or receive emails; overall a much better set of alternatives to email-only lists which I find quite restrictive. I was a member of the Ausarch list from '97 or '98 until it ended late last year and often found that similar debates and questions would regularly reappear (most frequent being 'where do I buy an <insert obscure item of archaeology related equipment here>!). Hopefully this will now be reduced.
More importantly though the new list is moderated and membership is restricted to people with some sort of specific qualification or interest in archaeology. I urge students particularly to subscribe as the type of information you recieve via these types of lists can be really important.
More information can be found here.
Posted byMick Morrison at 9:49 PM 4 comments
Labels: Archaeology resources, around the web, australia
Download web maps to your garmin GPS
January 07, 2009
It's a simple browser plugin that works on Windows and the Mac and is apparently compatible with any Garmin GPS that is able to connect to your computer via USB. It's free and can be found here:
http://www8.garmin.com/products/communicator/faq.jsp
I found this service on the Free Geography Tools blog: if you have a background in archaeology, earth sciences or other allied fields and you use 'maps' (which will be all of you!) I highly recommend visiting. Many tips for free software, web services and so on.
Posted byMick Morrison at 8:41 PM 0 comments
Labels: archaeological computing, around the web
Holocene climate change: some useful reviews
December 30, 2008
As a non-specialist it can be a little difficult to access this body of knowledge without first consulting an authoritative overview of many other more specialised (and often arduously complex!) sources. There are several publications that I thought I would quickly highlight here today which may be of relevence to anyone interested in writing or learning about Holocene climate change.
Climate change 2001: the scientific basis
The first is a book published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) entitled 'Climate change 2001: the scientific basis' and edited by Houghton et al (1). This report was developed as a contribution to the IPCC Third Assessment Report and is intended to provide "...the most comprehensive and up-to-date scientific assessment of past, present and future climate change" and to "...form the standard scientific reference for all those concerned with climate change and its consequences" (2). The book principally focusses upon analysing and assessing evidence for recent climate change and in particular those changes bought on by increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases however as part of this it reviews evidence for past environmental change, particularly in the past few thousand years. It is written in a very accessible style and provides clear explanations of key concepts and terms that appear regularly in more specialised publications (such as 'climate forcing', 'proxy indicators'). Chapters 1 and 2 are probably of most relevance to people interested in understanding past climatic systems. Almost a decade has passed since it was published and thus new data are available from more specialised sources, however this book nevertheless provides a readily accessible starting point for anyone interested in understanding past climates.
The full report can be accessed online at no cost here
Mid- to late Holocene climate change, Wanner et al 2008
A second comprehensive technical paper of note has recently been published in Quaternary Science Reviews by Wanner et al 2008 entitled 'Mid- to Late Holocene climate change: an overview'. As it is written for a specialised audience this particular article may not be for everyone however it provides a comprehensive review of proxy-based climatic reconstructions which apply to the past 6,000 years. It is global in coverage and aims to develop an explanatory framework for climate change and variability during the past 6000 years or so. Unfortunately, it is not freely available and you will need institutional or library access of some type, or you can purchase it online at the link below. You can download the citation directly into a bibliographic database from my citulike webpage.
The abstract is available online at the Elsevier website.
* Note: Figure 1 is a Creative Commons licenced image created for Global Warming Art, originally prepared by Robert A. Rhode. It is not drawn from either of the sources I have discussed in this post. It represents a comparison of 10 different published reconstructions of mean temperature changes over the past 2000 years and is simply included here to highlight the extent of recent (past 2000 years) climate change.
Posted byMick Morrison at 2:49 PM 0 comments
Labels: around the web, Past environments, Research news
A quick comment on my site feed
December 18, 2008
There are two ways to receive notifications about updates to this site without visiting the site itself: using a feed and reading my posts in a feed reader such as Google Reader OR by subscribing to the email newsletter service (link is in the sidebar). Both work and have their advantages and disadvantages.
For those of you who subscribe to my site feed please note I am about to switch over to using Feedburner, a service that provides me with more information about who is reading my blog and I hope a better product for my readers.
So, by the time anyone reads this, the old feed address will be redirected to feedburner. Importantly, you don't need to lift a finger at all. It will happen automagically. Although I don't expect any problems during the changeover, I wanted to throw up a quick post here in case something does go wrong for some of my readers. So if you do have any problems you simply need to update the subscription address in your feed reader to the following:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/mickmorrisonsarchaeologyblog/
Please post a comment here if you have any problems.
Thanks!
Posted byMick Morrison at 2:40 PM 0 comments
