In this episode, Jason Church speaks with Curtis Deselles, an intern with the Materials Research program at NCPTT, discusses the use of eddy currents and eddy current technology in conservation science. Mr. Deselles has built several eddy current analyzers, custom software, and presented on this topic at a non-destructive conference in St. Louis.

NCPTT has been using eddy current technology in preservation and will be bringing this tool to the iPhone platform in 2010. Download Episode 8 as an mp3 or subscribe via iTunes.

The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT), Cane River National Heritage Area (CRNHA), and Cane River Creole National Historic Park (CARI) will showcase recent research at the 9th annual Preservation in Your Community (PIYC) on August 11, 2009 at 5:30 p.m. at NCPTT’s Lee H. Nelson Hall on Northwestern’s campus.

Schedule and abstracts for the Nationwide Cemetery Preservation Summit from October 19-21, 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Register before September 11, 2009 for $299 ($399 thereafter).

Key sessions are expected to include Archeology, Mapping and Documentation, Landscapes, Engineering Challenges, Issues in National Cemeteries, and Materials Conservation.

A variety of materials and methods have been used to preserve ceramic vessels. Many have proven successful, while others are damaging. Monitoring and evaluation of past treatments is a documented research priority in the conservation field. The Arizona State Museum (ASM) has examined, recorded and analyzed the performance of past treatments on 20,000 southwest vessels and a modern storage facility.

This research has afforded the opportunity to look forwards and backwards to identify patterns in archaeological methods, museum management and conservation.

One of the biggest barriers to the rapid spread of cutting edge, innovative technologies in archeology is cost.  Let’s face it: things that end in “-ometer” or “-oscopy” tend to be pricey.  And if they are really new, or if their utility in some contexts has yet to be proven, the price remains in the stratosphere [...]

New Philadelphia, Illinois was the first town platted and legally registered by an African American in the United States. Founded by Frank McWorter, a former slave, in 1836, this town grew as a demographically integrated community through the late nineteenth century. The National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT) awarded funding of $14,800 to test the usefulness of low-altitude aerial surveys employing high resolution thermal imaging at New Philadelphia.

The success of this technique will provide an extremely useful resource for applications on numerous similar sites throughout the nation.

This project involved developing a new method for using the chemical content of freshwater mussel shell as a means of sourcing prehistoric, shell-tempered pottery and shell artifacts to their places of origin. By extension, this means that prehistoric trade and exchange networks can be mapped out.

Because each waterway is chemically different to some extent, and because mussels incorporate the chemicals into their shells, it is theoretically possible to identify where shell artifacts or shell-tempered pottery was made by chemically analyzing the shell.

Getting archeology onto the silver or flat screen has always been a tricky proposition: you have to entertain, but stick to the facts, all without encouraging site looting. One of the programs that seems to have done it, at least in the U.K., is Time Team. And now it’s coming to the U.S.

As Kris Hurst put it on her About.com blog, Time Team America “brings a Mission Impossible team of professional archaeologists to a different archaeological site in the United States,” where they spend “three days at each site, bringing along a raft of cutting edge remote sensing and geophysical survey techniques.”

The need is clear for rapid, wide-area, planning level inventories of archaeological sites, which are disappearing rapidly because of development and looting. Inventory makes preservation through monitoring and proactive planning possible.

Successful protocols for the use of sophisticated synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technologies for such inventories in certain environments were formulated recently.

David Morgan, Chief of Archeology and Collections at the National Park Service National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, talks about the annual geophysics workshop course that we call Prospection in Depth

Limited seating is still available for this five day course at the Presidio in San Francisco from August 4-8, 2009. The tuition of $499 includes lodging in a historic barracks facility at the heart of the Presidio.

Register Online Today.

Today in The Preservation Technology Podcast, NCPTT visits with Ruth Tringham, one of the founders of the University of California Berkley the People in Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology at Berkley (MACTiA). As a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkley Ruth uses an online virtual environment called Second Life in her teaching.

Download Episode 5 as an mp3 or subscribe via iTunes.

Prospection in Depth 2009, a course in archaeological geophysics, will be hosted from August 4-8, 2009 in partnership with the Presidio Trust at the site of El Presidio de San Francisco, in California. Register for this course online.

When organizing the Remote Site Surveillance meeting held last year, in August of 2008, one of the things I hoped to do was spark discussion about the administrative sustainability of surveillance/monitoring programs…

NCPTT and the Presidio Trust will present “Prospection in Depth 2009,” a workshop on geophysical prospection on August 4-8.

As part of our Remote Site Surveillance event in August of 2008, which I’ve mentioned in the prior two blog posts, we are working to enhance the joint U.S. Forest Service-Louisiana Army National Guard’s “Site Vulnerability Assessment Model.”

Back in Blog 2, “Turning the Wheel…,” I was tracing the strange but true link between methamphetamines and antiquities theft. Turns out I’m not the only person with this on their mind.

NCPTT’s David W. Morgan and Jason Church presented preliminary results of portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analysis of copper at the joint Louisiana Archaeological Society and Mississippi Archaeological Association meeting held from February 27-March 1, 2009 in Natchez, Miss.

Recent research reveals bacteria may be the biggest ally in the fight to preserve ancient artifacts from erosion and deterioration.

Katrina, 9-11, and “other challenges mean the preservation of our historic resources…requires innovative and proactive approaches during the coming decades” (Preserve America p5). That, I think, is where our remote archaeological site surveillance event comes into its own, especially when you consider how clearly antiquities trade, narcotics trafficking, and terrorism are becoming linked.

In 2006 the White House launched Preserve America. Parallel to this, on a much tinier scale, was an event on the use of surveillance equipment for remote archaeological site surveillance. In its own humble fashion this little cog actually helps turn the enormous Preserve America wheel.