As part of an archaeological methods course, my classmates and I designed and executed a group project excavating an old dike in Carleton’s Cowling Arboretum that had once held water to power a flour mill on the Cannon River. After our archaeological work, we contributed to a public-facing website that includes all the previous project work from past iterations of the class and also hosted a community archaeology day. My work on the website includes a summary of one week’s work in the field, photos of the excavation, and writing about mapping and calculating the volume of the dike.
This project involved thinking about how digital technologies might offer new pathways for traditional archaeological methods and artifact storage, analysis, and presentation. For example, while the digitization of artifacts can help address issues of collection size and maintenance, it is critical to think about how to use digital archives responsibly so as not to replicate problems with data management and storage. While it did not end up on the photogrammetry page of the site, I created a 3D model of one of the field sites before it had been excavated using Agisoft Metashape.
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