Thank you very much Manuel. Thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning about our
HALo project and to set it in the context of some of the wider engagement work that the Trimontium
Trust is doing. Can I run on? yeah that's fine I now see how I can run the slides on. We've
been in business now for about 30 years, we're an independent museum and a local Roman history
society. We're based in Melrose in the Scottish Borders. We have been running for the last three
decades a number of community engagement projects and we have regular speakers, very high calibre
during the winter season and during the summer period we have got a lot of outdoor activities.
The main thing that we have on our plate at the moment is renovation of our museum. I'm sorry
the videos don't work in the pdf file so you'll have to go to our website to see these but that
museum refurbishment is just coming to a close and will be open towards the end of July.
Interestingly, what Chiara was saying about the numbers falling in heritage tourism... we run
a temporary museum in Abbey House in Melrose and we've actually seen no fall off in numbers at all
but the profile of visitors has changed. In the past we would have a lot of foreign tourists
but now they're almost exclusively UK and we've been open now for a week and the numbers are
almost exactly the same as they were before the lockdown so that's that's quite interesting and I
think tourism may bounce back and certainly local tourism may bounce back faster than we think.
The trust is not just about the museum though and we have lots of outdoor activities and
the health and well-being element of that is quite important to us. The site itself
is a fair size and extends over many acres and we have a walk that's scheduled to go twice a
week and runs throughout the season from April through to October and the walk is a substantial
investment of time by our volunteers but it's very much appreciated by the public.
I had a video there of the walk but you can't see it unfortunately. We've worked out how many
'person' kilometres that's been over the last 30 seasons.. it's 90,000 kilometers which
is quite a substantial amount of energy being spent walking around our site particularly when
there's relatively little to see there and it's brought to life by the imagination of our guides.
There are some bigger walks in the area. This is the Eildon Hills and some of our longer walks and
longer paths are several kilometers long so we make sure that we get as much use if you like,
out of our local Iron age heritage in the Melrose area. About three years ago we thought
that we needed to extend that concept and do something much bigger and this was part of the
South of Scotland Economic Partnership area which as you can see spreads from Eyemouth on the east
coast down to Stranraer on the west coast which is essentially the Scottish Borders and Dumfries
and Galloway area and we looked at what our natural resources were and we have a very intense
pattern of Iron age sites and later sites for example medieval castles and battlefields and
so on but the thing that we had by the bucket load were Iron age hill forts and in fact if you look
at the hill fort Atlas kindly provided here by the Oxford Archaeology department and this shows the
spread of hill forts in the north of Britain. When we blow that image up you can see the intensity
of hill forts in our area is absolutely staggering and we thought that it would be
very helpful to make best use of that by developing some sort of interactive process
Now the Borders hills are just the right height for hill forts. You don't get hill
forts on really high hills you don't get them on many low hills they just have to be that nice sort of
500 to 1000 feet height and the Borders is absolutely teeming with hills of that size.
So we decided that the best thing to do was to pull together a programme of how we could interact
with that using the boom that there seemed to be in heritage tourism at the time. As we know
heritage tourism centres around several concepts but one of them is traveling to places and seeing
artefact and taking part in activities that authentically represent the stories and peoples
of the past. Now that is based on hands-on and I'm going to talk about some of the hands-on stuff
but we've also explored and were exploring the virtual element of this
before the pandemic actually struck, so this was something that we were already working on before
we were if you like, separated from our ability to have as much hands-on activity as we had hoped.
And often Archaeotourists if you want to use that term...
are attracted particularly to areas that are relatively difficult and quite beautiful to
get to so they enjoy the challenge if you like, of walking particularly in the hills and with
all the well-being advantages of that and this is where the interaction with our Hill Fort Heritage
really started to take shape. There are many other organizations involved in Archaeotourism and
hands-on activities in Vindolanda for example is one of them. -And there of course, you can,
if you're lucky enough, you can actually get your hands dirty and dig and that is a truly
unique and much sought-after experience but not everybody is actually interested in being
soaked through and I was speaking to the people who've been working for this last week and the
weather has been pretty awful. Some people want the experience but not necessarily the physical
hardships of going on a dig. So that led us to explore a sort of Archaeotourism light,
which was the ability to become engaged with the historical landscape but without necessarily being
committed to archaeological excavations with the time and physical consequences of that. So
we developed the concept of the Historical Archaeological Landscape Observatory HALo
for short) and that would be a structure which would be attached to the rear of our refurbished
museum. We're in the process of fundraising for this at the moment. The museum is phase one,
HALo is phase two and we've just started as I say, the process of fundraising for this
and it involves creating essentially a lab for between five and ten people which would have
fold aways and partitions to allow the space to be opened out and used for class-size school groups.
It would have within these partitioned off areas, latest image processors, laser scanners
and projection recording equipment. We have specified all this is off-shelf so we're
not looking at complicated one-off technology. Most of this technology is currently available,
in fact it's all currently available and and we've been exploring what that is actually capable of
doing. The lab itself would be relatively small and stationed at the back of the new build.
There we would be able to deal with the output of what in essence is archaeological visualization.
That would involve remote sensing and photography photogrammetry,
3-D scanning and using virtual reality technology and introducing people who
are interested but perhaps may never have had the experience of that type of engagement with
archaeological and historical material. It would also involve a physical element to it, of getting
out into the hills and it hopefully will be a two day experience, one day of gathering some
data non-invasively and bringing that data back to the lab to interpret and better understand.
Some of that would involve laser Artefact scanning and we've already started
doing that and some of it would be done by very readily accessible technology, a lot of
personal phones now will allow photogrammetry and using that data, downloading that data
is actually relatively straightforward these days. 3-D structuring of archaeological Artefacts is
something that we particularly are interested in. This is Traprain Law. These are drones,
individual drone images and this is a three-dimensional model of the whole hill so you
can visualize everything from the size of Traprain Law which is about a kilometer and a bit wide,
right down to an Artefact that's thimble-sized. So it immediately allows you to draw that historical
and archaeological object down to a size that you can actually handle in the comfort of a lab. Our
concept is to allow sites to be visited because that has a health element to it, to record the
data when we're there, either by photogrammetry or geophysics or metal detection or whatever
technology is chosen for that particular site and then to manipulate the data once you've taken
it back to the lab. And then, the final thing is to make it tactile, to create something and of course this is
where 3-D printing comes in and as we know, there are lots of different ways of doing that now.
The British Museum have made available data sets now for 3-D printing freely available. And lots
of sites now, it's not just ours, many sites are making their objects, some of the smaller objects,
readily available for people to print out and this is very exciting. We've done some of this
ourself as you know, Newstead Trimontium have these enigmatic pits at the fort,
stuffed with Roman material and here are some of the horses that were slaughtered and put
into the pits and we've taken one of the skulls here and we've CT scanned it (but it could be
imaged in any way that you like from photogrammetry through to scanning and from
that we've created a life-size print. Now what this immediately does is allows the individual,
the participant, to have something that they can take away with them and that element
of being able to touch it hold it, examine it, understand it and then take it away with you
we think, is something that those who are interested in archaeotourism would buy into.
So in essence.. in conclusion, our idea is to develop the concept further to fit in with
the completion of phase two, to develop small group tours and that would be using a mini-bus to
take people out to sites, obviously with landowner permission. One of the great things about the
Borders is that the landowners all know each other very well and they're very happy about people
non-invasively to walk their sites, which is a great boon for us in this area to do some on-site
survey non-invasively and retrieve that data to the lab and then as I say reconstruct and create
or recreate the historical landscape. We're hoping that this tactile element, this creational element
will also help to rejuvenate things like young archaeologists clubs which to an extent are
falling into abeyance because children and younger people these days tend to live in the
the digital sphere anyway so this we're hoping will act as a link to draw people back
to that particular element. So we see the young and the old being potentially
attracted to this type of engagement with their Iron age heritage.. so that's my talk
in a nutshell. I think I've taken my 15 minutes so I'll hand back to Manuel (TALK ENDS)