I am pleased to announce a new podcast, an interview with prof. Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida on his applications of scientific analyses to archaeological research. It is expected that this podcast will be followed shortly by other interviews to archaeologists that are applying different scientific techniques to archaeology: this should be the first podcast of a new exciting series. Furthermore, there are pictures accompanying this podcast and its difficult subject! You can now find all podcasts in one page. As always, any feedback is appreciated: just follow the feedback link.
The new series of podcasts on archaeological sciences wants to encourage young and less young archaeologist to check out the possibilities offered by new technologies, and especially emphasise the crucial importance of scientific analyses for interpretation: there are indeed results that cannot be obtained by “traditional” means. I think that scientific analyses should become an ordinary part of archaeological practice and new students should start familiarising with them as early as possible, whether they wish to work in the lab or just interpret the results. In many cases scientific analyses are simply unknown or believed to be specialist studies and treated as curiosities (e.g. the many appendixes in publications). Integrated, multi-disciplinary approaches are still rare because too often people does not know what analyses can do. In some instances there are multi-disciplinary approaches that have been drafted without fully understanding the limits and capabilities of analyses. For example, provenance studies of ceramics require large collections of clay samples and some ideas on exchange and circulation in the specific cases to be really useful. Absolute dates can be obtained through a variety of analyses; are we picking the right one?
I think that presenting a few case studies and some accounts of real experiences doing archaeology between lab and field will motivate some people in exploring the possibilities of archaeological sciences in a way that a textbook cannot. In the first interview of this series it is evident the excitement of discovery well known by anybody that has unearthed an artefact, and prof. Tykot succeeds in conveying the message that all analyses should be carried out for a reason and provide real answers to questions arisen in the field.
The pictures will help in understanding some passages; they are ordered to provide a short overview of many “mysterious” machines and then illustrate some of the work and results (maps and graphs!) of the case studies mentioned in the interview. They can be browsed before, during or after the interview; there is no requirement to see the pictures in order to follow the interview (but we had them in front of us during the interview, hence my decision to make them available). Please note that all the pictures are copyrighted and must not be copied or reused without explicit permission from prof. Tykot.
None of the interviews are done in a professional studio, so please be aware that the quality of the audio can vary. The interviews are also not scripted, and this might be evident at times. All the podcasts are recordings of two archaeologists chatting. I hope you find this new podcast useful.
