The Zagora Infrared Photogrammetry Project Begins

*****In the email you received, Experiment.com deleted half the pictures and the words. Please ignore that and enjoy this post in all its glory ******

 

Having lunch on the cliffs of Zagora

We are currently about 1.5 weeks into our project and we have found exciting things. I can’t discuss a lot of what we have found until it is reported to the Greek archaeological service and to the University of Sydney/AAIA. However, it is fair to say that we are all excited about the results we have so far.

One example I can show is from an area in the South East of Zagora. In 2012-2014, a series of trenches were placed in the area to try understand how people entered the site from the nearby fortification gateway. When I excavated a trench there in 2013, we were amazed to find that we were not hitting bedrock. This is unusual for Zagora, where bedrock is often peaking through the surface or is at most maybe 0.5m under ground. But here, we got to a few meters in depth and didn’t find it. 

One question we have always had is, how big is this natural crevice? Well, the thermal camera that was crowd sourced through this site and through your amazing donations, has now told us a lot.

 

What you can see is that between the bedrock outcrops that are exposed, we have a line of heat (Orange is hot, Blue is cold), which is clearly a ridge of bedrock running between them.  It goes from the bedrock in the top right of the image, down to that in the centre, then across to the old spoil heap and back up towards the left of the backfilled trenches. It then travels under a wall(located under the Bedrock caption at the top of the screen). Along with excavation, and also what we know was in the area before we started digging, this gives us an understanding of the size of the feature. The crevice is roughly the shape of the line in the image.

As I have said before, this is something I can show you as it is about natural features, not about archaeological remains. I am hoping in the following weeks and months, you may start to hear about what else we have found. I will post a few action shots below and then in the next week, let you know about all the work that takes place just so an area can be photographed for 15 minutes.

But it is important to sign off this post with a big thank you. The thermal camera is revealing really interesting archaeological data and without your amazing support, we could never have done this. 

 

Houses in Area J, these have been conserved in the last few years and had a fence erected around it.

 

Emma Williams, the project 2IC, surveying in ground control points.

 

A cross carved into the local schist

 

A panorama of a nearby field where we were creating 3d models. (Zagora is in the background)