Transcriber: F Laffeber Reviewer: Denise RQ
A sense of place.
What I'd like you to do this evening, this afternoon,
is try to think about doing archeology
in one of the world's most difficult, contentious regions in the world,
and then, layer on top of that,
doing that work in a highly religious environment.
The question will be: how can we go forward?
What I'm going to suggest
is that through a new discipline that we can call cyber-archeology,
we have a way to move forward.
And a lot of what I'm going to share with you today
is the result of research
that my students, colleagues, and I have been doing
at an amazing new research center at UCC San Diego,
called the California Institute
for Telecommunications and Information Technology
It's a mouthful, we'll just call it Calit2.
Our talk today, when we talk about a sense of place,
there are holy places, sacred places for every culture.
And here, in Northern California, we can think of Mount Shasta;
it means certain things for Native Americans,
it means certain things for other members of the population.
But when we talk on the regional scale of a holy land,
what comes to mind is India, for example, the whole subcontinent,
or in the area where I have been working for over 40 years,
the Middle East.
And in particular, the holy land of Israel, Jordan, Palestine;
it even extends down to Northwest Arabia here.
This is the land bridge
between two continents of Africa and Asia.
When we think of Jerusalem, this is emblematic of this problem,
because people of different faiths, people of different social backgrounds,
look at a landscape, and they see it entirely differently.
We have to remember this, when we look at Jerusalem, for example,
the three great monotheistic faiths:
Christianity looks at it with their eyes;
here we see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
where Jesus died - this marks that area -
the Temple Mount, where Mohammed ascended to Heaven,
and then, if we look on the edge of the Temple Mount,
the Western Wall, where Jewish tradition has the Sacred Temple.
So, this landscape is highly charged,
and people from different faith backgrounds
are going to have different ways of looking at the landscape,
and I believe that cyber-archeology,
which is actually the melding of the latest advances
in computer science, engineering, and the hard sciences, with archeology,
offers a way forward.
One way to think of that is from a personal perspective.
I've been grappling with this problem of how to tell an objective story
since I was 17 years old and went on my first dig in Israel.
You can see me here at the Biblical site of Tel Gezer
- yes, we wore pants that short back in those days -
and I've tried to work through this,
and through our interdisciplinary work in recent years, the last five years,
I think we've come on to a solution,
and that is indeed cyber-archeology.
I started my doctoral research, working in the Holy Land,
focusing on the role of technology on social evolution,
specifically, ancient metalworking.
And it begins around 6,000 years ago,
with the first metal revolution in the Copper Age.
And I spent my whole early career working on the role of metal:
who controlled it?
How was it traded? What was its exact role in society?
These are questions
that we, as anthropologists, can look at throughout all the phases of human history
from the Copper Age all the way to Islamic times.
This research led me to focus
on some rather large excavations in Israel's Negev Desert,
a Copper Age site called Shikmim here.
We've discovered that all the metals that we found at this site
- and the copper ore you can see here I'm holding a piece of it -
with my colleague Dr. Andreas Hauptmann,
came from over a 100 miles away,
in the deserts of Southern Jordan.
This is the area where the copper ore beds are,
it's called Faynan, it's about 50 kilometers south of the Dead Sea,
that's about 35 miles.
We're looking at about a 150 square mile area here,
very rich in malachite deposits, it's a very rugged terrain,
this is about 16 miles as the crow flies here.
It's down in the lowlands of this region, called Biblical Edom,
that we have this site called Khirbat en-Nahas,
"the Ruins of Copper" in Arabic,
which I'm going to talk a little bit about today.
We're about 16 kilometers from the famous site of Petra,
you might be familiar with
from the movies of the Raiders of the Lost Ark series.
This is a very important area, and you have to ask yourself:
how do you get started, working in an area like Jordan?
And what I came up with,
was that the best way was to create an international expedition,
where we brought together Israeli, Jordanian,
American - that was me -, and German scholars,
where we reconstructed one of the ancient trade routes
from the Faynan area to Israel,
it was about a two-week trip on donkeys,
and this was a bonding experience.
That was several years after the peace treaty
between Israel and Jordan, back in 1994.
What we discovered was
that we could study the role of mining and metallurgy
through deep time, through all those periods of social evolution,
and here you can see, I am working in one of these mines,
with Dr. Mohammad Najjar, my Jordanian colleague.
And over the years, we developed very close ties,
and we've been investigating these problems
of the role of technology on social evolution.
That brought us through all the periods up to the Iron Age.
The Iron Age is the Biblical period, from about 1,200 to 500 BC,
actually one of the most contentious periods
in the archeology of the Middle East
because it has to do with the Bible, the Old Testament.
Here you can see one of the most famous Iron Age sites, Khirbat en-Nahas,
that we've been excavating since 2002.
This is a huge fortress,
one of the largest desert fortresses of the Holy Land,
it's about 300 feet by 300 feet.
There is the gatehouse to the fortress.
These are black slag mounds:
industrial slag from the smelting of copper ore.
We started to excavate there,
and we applied a number of cyber-archeology methods
to test certain historical and anthropological questions.
The traditional view is that this Iron Age period,
the 10th century BC in particular,
is the time of King David and King Solomon,
when, if you read the Bible verbatim,
this was a magnificent kingdom at this time:
the Israelite united monarchy.
And here you can see a painting by Edward Poynter,
showing the beautiful Queen of Sheba meeting with Solomon
in his palace in Jerusalem.
The other view is what we call the Biblical "minimalist" view,
which says, since the Bible was created
it was edited in its final edition around 500 BC,
that anything earlier - like about the 10th century BC -
would be total fiction.
And if that was true, then characters like David and Solomon
were no stronger than petty Mafia Dons, if you like.
This is really in a nutshell what the scholarly debate is.
So how can we approach this in an objective fashion?
We do this through harnessing cyber-archeology,
through data collection, data management, analysis, and scientific visualization.
This is a model of Khirbat en-Nahas:
a photo with all of the different tools that we've developed.
This is a scientific visualization,
a 3D-display we have in our lab;
these are scanners for scanning artifacts in 3D;
high definition digital photography, a balloon system for areal photography,
a LIDAR system for scanning sites,
GPS units for collecting individual data points,
so we have the exact X, Y, and Z elevation values;
and other elements we use in the area.
Now what this does is it creates what we could call a 'data avalanche'.
Here you can see our last three excavation seasons:
2007, 2009, and last fall, we just got back from our excavations.
And we're measuring the amount of data in gigabytes,
so you could put one bible on 4.5 megabytes,
you could put 220 bibles on a gigabyte.
That just gives you an idea of this exponential growth in data.
So cyber-archeology pulls it all together
and enables us to tell the story of what happened in the past.
One of the tools we use is called LIDAR,
Light Detection and Ranging Laser scanning of archeological sites.
So instead of collecting one data point, X, Y, and Z,
which is accurate to plus or minus a centimeter,
we can now collect 1.5 billion data points
in several days of work.
Here you can see we're taking that point-cloud data,
and we're able to go to that fortress that we looked at.
Our work also utilizes radiocarbon dating.
We've produced the most radiocarbon dates
over a 100, for any archeological site from the Iron Age.
We can throw in, using the LIDAR as a kind of scaffold,
we can put geographic information system data,
that is the layers and every single artifact that we find,
these are the actual radiocarbon dates in their layers,
and we can see when this thing was constructed.
The fortress was constructed exactly in the 10th Century BC,
the time of David and Solomon.
And this shows us that the instruments of state power
were in place at this time in the Southern Levine.
This goes against the Biblical minimalist perspective.
We've also excavated through those deep slag mounds on the site.
Those black slag mounds.
And what we see when we do the radiocarbon dating
is that we have basically, two main phases of copper production here
in the 9th century BC, and the 10th century BC.
That means that down here,
there's over 12 feet of industrial scale slag.
That means that only a state level or a kingdom level of social integration
could've actually produced and organized metal production at that time.
So this is an amazing discovery.
Did we find Solomon's mines?
Did we find evidence of David and Solomon?
No, but what we've done is we put on the table
that this is possible, that they were around.
This little clip will give you a feel
for how we apply the cyber-archeology in the field.
My undergrads from Aerospace and Engineering
designed this helium-balloon platform for stereo-digital photography,
that we can fly on a daily basis over the site.
Here's Khirbat en-Nahas. This may be a ritual center over here.
There's the big fortress we've looked at, the gatehouse.
This is a central area, an administrative building,
a tower, another area over on this side,
all contemporary in the 10th century BC.
We put that together, and you can create
an amazing reconstruction of what this site looked like
from a social, and anthropological perspective.
These are the markers of a state-level society.
We can go further.
We can take our individual data
and collaborate with other members of the Middle East community
- our university has a working relationship
with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology,
a brand-new university -
we have built them a scientific visualization lab
which is about three times bigger than what we have at UCSD.
Guess why?
Here you can see,
I was lucky enough to be invited to the opening of KAUST, in 2009,
and here I'm showing my friend Sami Almagouth the data
from that deep section through the slag mound at Khirbat en-Nahas.
We've plotted every single artifact
in its absolute location at the site.
And so we can see patterning in the data,
we can reconstruct the technology, and so on.
Everybody is interested in telling their story.
Every culture has a story to tell,
and cyber-archeology is that place
where we can all come together and show that.
And finally, in closing, I'd like to make some remarks
about how we can share these data, not only with the scholarly community
but also with the public at large, with you.
With a friend of mine, Steve Savage from Arizona State University,
we built a cyber-infrastructure over the web called
the Digital Archeology Atlas of the Holy Land,
where we can load in thousands of data,
just everything from site location to individual artifacts.
If I take a potsherd, like this,
this is really a piece of trash, right?
But for us, archeologists,
if we can contextualize it, it becomes like gold.
It's gold in terms of its historical value.
We deliver all our data over a Google Earth platform,
now we're back to Israel and Jordan, the south end of the Dead Sea,
we're flying down over Google Earth to Khirbat en-Nahas,
there's the fortress, there's this pot.
We can burrow down and see exactly where it's from,
and it begins to have a lot of social and contextual meaning
that we're able to do through cyber-archeology.
Finally, the last thing I'd like to say,
is that we work with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan,
we take their LIDAR data, like this, from Petra, this is the Treasury,
And we can model it in 3D.
This becomes a nice conservation tool,
but we're taking it one step further
by using LIDAR as a research platform, which I tried to show you.
Finally, good news, about 18 months ago, Popular Science voted our lab
one of the Top 30 'Awesome College Labs'.
We're very proud of that.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)