Category Archives: Science & Technology

Science & Technology

Ode to a Former Grecian Urn

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It doesn’t really matter where one digs, in the American Southwest, the Middle East or a Colonial New England Site, pottery of one type or another will appear.  When I wrote about the excavations at the Priestly House in Sunbury, Pa., there was Jasperware from England; in the Southwest Four Corners area we have graywares and black and white pottery; and here at Tel Akko, we have everything from Bronze Age through Iron Age to Persian, Greek, Roman, Crusader and Ottoman.  That is a lot of pottery and a lot of styles to learn to identify.  Happily, I don’t have to learn them.  We leave that to an expert.  But we do have to collect them and haul them off the tel buckets full at a time.  Most of the pottery is pretty utilitarian.  Cooking pots, oil lamps, storage jars.  Some is quite beautiful with nicely slipped surfaces or painted patterns.  I’m especially fond of the Attic pottery from Greece.  Think Ode to a Grecian Urn illustrations and you are just about there.  The pottery has a shiny hard black or red surface with ornate designs.  It is really pretty.  But more importantly, the smooth surface makes washing it incredibly easy, as the dirt does not generally stick to it.

Because wash it we must.  First looking to see if there are any ostraca – hand written notes on pieces of pottery – and then so it can be dated and typed.

Some of the coarse pottery is nearly impossible to clean with rootlet trails and calcium deposits, but nothing seems to stick to the Greek stuff.  And it feels so nice and smooth to the touch.

Unlike the bottom of the soaking buckets, which contain all the silt that melted off the sherds and is slimy and just plain icky.  No one wants to be the one to search the bottom of the bucket deposits for that last piece of pottery.  It’s just so gross.

Science & Technology, Society & Culture

City of Gold

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It has been a long time since I went to visit places in Jerusalem with someone who has never been there before.  Everyone in my family has been several or more times, as have most of my friends.  Whether you love Jerusalem, revere it or feel uncomfortable there, it is certainly not a city that one forgets or ignores.

Penn State’s Tel Akko project visited Jerusalem last weekend.  There were stops at the City of David, the Western Wall, the new Mamila Mall (more on that later) and the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher.  I’ve pretty much seen them all before, but many in our group had not.  Most are not Jewish, but all visited the appropriate side of the wall – one side for men and one side for women – with proper dignity and respect.  It is an awkward place.  There are many women sitting and praying and always a line of women up at the wall itself making personal supplication or placing a small note between the stones.  What becomes awkward is that no one ever turns around and walks away from the wall, one must back away.  Lots of tourists and locals backing out of a small space can be chaotic.

The Wall is the remains of the outer retaining wall of the Second Temple built by Herod the Great.  This is all that remains and of course, nothing remains of the First Temple, built by Solomon and destroyed by the Babylonians.

The City of David, however, is an interesting site.  Done up in a sort of Disney park motif, it is perhaps the location of where David built his palace when he, if he, came to Jerusalem.  Excavations in the area have gone on for a while, but there is great debate as to how old the ruins are and to whom they should be attributed.  I’d like to think they were King David’s, but the archaeologist and scientist in me want some solid proof.

A house with numbered stones that has been deconstructed and reconstructed
The Stern House where Theodore Herzl slept was removed and reconstructed in the Mamila shopping mall. The stone numbers have not been removed. Credit: Avishal Teicher.

The strange thing about Jerusalem – besides the various religious groups and the many sects of these religious groups, Jewish, Christian and Moslem — is that wherever you walk, you appear to be walking uphill.  There are either stairs, which one never returns down, or slopes one never sees the upside to.  I realize that Jerusalem is not an M.C. Escher painting, but it acts that way sometimes.  Climbing stairs with rails as hot as a stovetop and the golden sandstones, so indicative of the city, reflecting the glaring sun in your face.  I do appreciate Jerusalem, but I must say, I don’t necessarily like it.  Eventually, I left the group, before the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher (which I have seen many times) to walk through the shuk (outdoor street market) drinking Diet Coke and looking for a place for lunch.

Much more civilized.

But here’s the interesting bit about the Mamila Mall.  A new mall was built by the Israelis to go over one of the valleys that surround the old city.  It makes movement from one hill to the other much easier.  But among the existing houses on the streets that were converted to the mall, was an historic house, the Stern House where Theodore Herzl, a late 19th early 20thcentury Zionist leader, stayed on his one visit to Israel.  Rather than destroy the house, they numbered every single piece of stone, took the building down and then rebuilt after the base of the mall was built.  It still has the numbers on it.  Looks very weird.

Science & Technology

Brushing Dirt

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Anyone who has ever done any archaeology knows that at one point or another dirt needs to be cleaned.  I realize this sounds oxymoronic, but in truth, dirt floors of a habitation need to be swept before photographing or drawing, rock wall have to be swept to see the stones that delineate them, and other features from time to time need to be swept.  There are no special implements for archaeological sweeping.  We use push brooms and whisk brooms and paint brushes and we sweep into dustpans, put dirt into buckets and then wheelbarrows.  Any pottery sherd or other artifact goes into a bucket for evaluation.

The first time I found myself sweeping a plaster floor with a push broom a simply stopped in the middle of the act and smiled.  I thought, my mother would be bent over laughing to see me sweeping dirt when I gave her so much trouble sweeping my room or the kitchen floor.  But somehow, it just seems different when it’s archaeology.

The beginning of a season at an existing site consists of a lot of cleanup.  The off season, usually winter, brings with it windblown dust, waterborne dirt and roots and weeds that spring up all over and refuse to be tamed.  Any prophylactic activity done the season before, such as sand bagging baulks – meter wide pieces of earth that are left in place to preserve the stratigraphy – must be removed.  The site needs to be pristine before work can really get done.

Once everything is satisfactorily tidy, then we take photographs, measure elevations, map in features and prepare to dig.  Areas started the season before continue as they did then.  New areas must begin at the modern ground surface and gradually go down through possible levels.

At Tel Akko, we have Early and Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, Persian, Greek and maybe Roman remains.  In the city of Akko there were also Crusader and Ottoman occupations.  So we dig, looking for clues to who lived there and how they lived.  Where they got their “good china” from and how they made metals.

At the same time, Tel Akko is a city park where early morning walkers stroll and groups of tourist surge by.  The past meeting the present.

Science & Technology, Society & Culture

What are you doing Dave?

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A while ago I wrote a story about self-replicating, autonomous robots that would clean up debris in our immediate portion of the solar system and then propagate out into the galaxy, returning information and perhaps informing us of our first alien encounter via laser-targeted, light-speed communications.  A very futuristic concept and a cool story.

In the course of my interview with John D. Mathews, professor of electrical engineering, I asked him if there were any concerns about these robots — which would also, by necessity, learn — suddenly turning against their makers.  I was specifically thinking of the replicators on the TV show Stargate.

Mathew’s response was that some form of Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” would of course direct the robots:

  • A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I pressed a little harder, but Mathews thought that potential problems could be worked out.  I don’t doubt him.  What struck me is that, when it comes to robots that have any greater intellect than an industrial, repetitive, one-armed, pick-and-place machine, we automatically turned to fiction, science fiction, for references to possibilities and potential hazards.

Cylon replica

Running through my mind was HAL of 2001 A Space Odyssey fame going insane, being shut down and slowly and slower singing “Daisy.”  What came to mind were both the Replicators and the Cylons that began as obvious machines and eventually took the form of their makers and tried to kill them.  Or the robotic house in Demon Seed trying to replicate itself via forced impregnation of the house’s female inhabitant.  And even Project 79 in the God Machine, Martin Caidin, who became sentient and tried to take over the world.   I remembered all the stories of robot rage, death and destruction.

Mathews on the other hand pulled out the Three Laws.  A way for robots to be beneficial to humanity while protecting themselves and a basis for a great many stories about good robots, or at least no worse than most humans robots.

Perhaps it is a case of the glass half full or half empty.  I’m not sure.  Today, besides industrial robots, the most contact most of us have with a robotic device is a Roomba and they certainly are not sentient.  Surgeons do robotic surgery, but that is usually a misnomer.  What they are actually doing is teleoperating very small tools.  The military also has robot drones, but as far as I know, they too are teleoperated.  None of our robots are sentient, yet.

But, an IBM computer managed to beat two of the best Jeopardy champs last year.  And beat them soundly.  Certainly the machine could not move on its own, and its process of answering was not actual artificial intelligence, but the possession of an enormous amount of available data and the speed to access it.  But it is a first step.

Will we some day explore other stars side-by-side with robotic companions, helpers, equals?  Will we be able to trust them any more than we would trust a human crewmember?  Would it really be all that different?

Science & Technology, Society & Culture

Fascinatin’ Rhythm

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Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead fame is known for pushing boundaries. A prime force behind the ethnically diverse genre known as world music, Hart won a Grammy for 2007’s “Global Drum Project.” His brand-new album, “Mysterium Tremendum,” goes way beyond globetrotting to encompass the rhythms of the entire universe. And some of the most far-out sounds on the record, literally, were created by Penn State’s Mark Ballora.

 Ballora, who teaches music technology at Penn State, creates “sonifications,” aural patterns in which data sets are represented as sound. As he explains, they’re “just like visualizations, except they’re aimed at the ear instead of the eye.” His compositions are incorporated as backing tracks on Hart’s new album.

In this fascinating TED talk given in December, Ballora shares examples of his oeuvre, taking rapt listeners on a sonic tour from the surface of the sun through the solar system and beyond, arriving at last at sounds that represent the echoes of the Big Bang. Though we can’t see them, he says, these are “the rhythms of space time that underlie the pulsations of our existence.”

Unlike composers of the late-night “Hearts of Space” genre, Ballora says, he strives to be true to the actual data, to create sonifications that are “both musically compelling and scientifically informative.”

Is it music? Is it science? Does it matter?

Pythagoras and Galileo, Ballora points out to his TED listeners, never saw the two as separate.

“The distinction is a recent imposition.”