passim in passing

It's that time again! Third year of my #dayofarch posts... repost now from Day of Archaeology ! If you're dying to see how they've changed over the years, have a look at 2011 ( augmented reality! ) and 2012 ( i reveal myself to be the tooth fairy )... Really, I work at the Natural History Museum in London (and tweet at @brennawalks ). And if you didn't already know, I'm part of the collective Tumblr of awesome that is Trowelblazers  ( @trowelblazers ). We get all excited about inspirational female pioneers in the trowel-blazing arts :) So! Archaeology, huh? Life outdoors? Fresh air? Meh. Up to your hips in muddy water in February, more like it. That's why I went and got myself a speciality.... TEETH! Yes. I am a living, breathing example of the incredibly rare animal... the Dental Anthropologist . And yes, that's a real thing. What do I do? Well... today, I'm hashing out some code that will preform a simple spatial analysis that will tell

Well, I thought I would expand a bit on my AR post, mostly because people seem a lot more interested in awesome hovering 3d images than in the metric qualification of surface expressions of ameloblast disruption (yeah... I know, go figure, right?). So here's an easy, totally free, step by step guide to making your own awesome bit of archaeology float around: You'll need: A webcam. Google Sketchup . This is a fantastic little offering from google which makes it ridiculously easy to create accurate 3d models. You can create any shape you like, though I find recreating structures is the easiest place to start (die, CAD, die). There's a startup guide here , but you can get fairly complicated if you'd like. You can also import stuff in; using freeware like Blender  you can easily convert 3d objects produced in other formats into something Google can read. For this example, I made a simple box, which I then painted with pictures of my (internet) face: Cool, no

  Well it's been a while, and while nothing particularly fascinating has happened to keep me from posting... well. Nothing particularly fascinating happened for quite some time. However, I am now properly back in the archaeological trenches, merrily mattocking out slots in obscure ditches for a commercial company in London. Well, they've hired me to look at some dead folk, but I managed to get a few good days on site (and a truly awesome farmer tan). In all this excitement, I have vaguely kept in the back of my mind that there are some very cool opportunities for archaeological engagement coming up. I'm pretty excited about #dayofarch , which is coming up as part of the Festival of British Archaeology on July 29th 2011 . A merry crew will be offering snapshot glimpses into the lives of archaeologists via blogs and other social media--highly recommended! I hope to see some folk (digitally) appearing. It should be good, you never know when you'll get a day like last