News Archive Item
IGERT-TEECH: UC San Diego professor conducts “cyber-archaeology” in lands far away
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The fall dig at the new site has revealed not only information about the Edomite kingdom but about societies that conducted copper mining in the area both before and after Old Testaments times, including from the Bronze Age (3000 to 2000 B.C.) to the Roman and Byzantine empires “and all the way up to a medieval Islamic period in the 14th or 15 century,” Levy said.
The fall dig at the new site involved and 10 undergraduates and 10 graduates — and a great deal of technology.
Levy’s team takes to the field a variety of computers, global positioning systems, x-ray fluorescent instruments, light detecting and ranging units and even stereo cameras flown over the sight on a balloon system.
Ram Ramasubramanian is a co-program director for the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program that is providing $3.2 million in funding over the life the project. “What moved this proposal up is that it involves structural engineering, computer science, material science, electrical engineering with anthropology and art history. It blew us away,” he said.
Levy said that among other things the technology is essential to documenting sites and their artifacts.
“I work closely with a lot of computer scientists. We want to record archaeological finds and their spatial context with as much precision as possible,” Levy said.
