News Release
New e-book focuses on use of cyber technologies including aerial and satellite image to survey archaeological sites in Jordan (depicted) and elsewhere.
December 18, 2012
E-Book Is Logical Next Step for Publicizing Brave New World of Cyber-Archaeology
CISA3 associate director Tom Levy teamed with the Biblical Archaeology Society to launch “Cyber-Archaeology in the Holy Land: The Future of the Past” as a free eBook. It’s a co-production of the society and the California institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), where CISA3 is based. “My research group at Calit2 has produced quite a few peer-reviewed papers concerning cyber-archaeology over the past three years,” said Levy, who co-authored the digital tome with Jordanian archaeologist Mohammad Najjar, UC San Diego archaeology alumnus Neil G. Smith (Ph.D. , ’11), and three scientists and engineers based in Calit2 – Thomas A. DeFanti, Falko Kuester and Albert Yu-Min Lin. ““We felt that it was time to get our message out to as many interested people as possible.” The eBook documents many of the new tpes of recording equipment, analytical methods, visualization tools and data-sharing structures now taking hold among archaeologists. Levy specifically recounts how he used an integrated toolkit on recent excavations in Jordan – a toolkit including GPS, ground-penetrating radar, LiDAR laser scanning, unmanned aerial drones, rapid 3D scanning machines, collaborative online databases and virtual-reality visualization environments, and much more.