Last night it rained and arriving at site this morning we found a bruised sky and sodden ground. We began the day, as all good archaeological digs start, with a nice cup of tea. By 9.00 am the clouds had cleared and a milky sunshine bathed the site-hut and buildings. After a talk about the day's activities from site director Chris Ellis, we walked up to the site.

Today, after yesterday's cleaning, we began to dig. Each excavator took a feature and excavated half of the material within it to leave a vertical face, or section, through the centre. This shows all of the layers that have formed within that feature and tells us how the hole has filled in. At the end of the dig we will be looking not only for features that seem to form part of shapes - such as roundhouses or square structures - but also for features that have filled up in a similar way. This may indicate that they are contemporary and therefore related.

In the afternoon training-dig favourite Matt Leivers from Wessex Archaeology came to give us the first of this week's workshops. Matt spoke about worked flint and how it has been used in the past. Struck flint can be very difficult to recognise so talks like this are invaluable to our excavators.

At 3pm it was back up to the site to continue excavation. Progress today has been incredible. Most people have finished excavating their feature and begun the process of recording it. Archaeology is by its very nature a destructive process, because by removing material from features we alter them. Good records are therefore most important.

Recent work by Wessex Archaeology in the Thames Estuary has been captured in two BBC programmes Thames Shipwrecks: a race against time. The programmes have been produced by Touch Productions and broadcast on BBC2 on Tuesday 26 August and Tuesday 2 September 2008.

Thames Shipwrecks: a race against time (BBC 2)

Find out more about the background to our work and involvement in the series over at Splash, our coastal and marine archaeology blog.

I should've wrote this a year ago, but I was too lazy to find my credentials, login and actually do it. So, sorry.

Anyway, by now perhaps you know I power the Virtual Earth Blog on MSDN, so if you haven't already point your RSS reader over there. I'm going to try and migrate some of this content over, but in the next few months I'll be deleting this blog.

CP

wow, it’s been awhile. we’re already well into the new year and I haven’t posted anything yet. thankfully, this is not just neglect on my part but the result of lots of development on the Arc2Earth front. There has been a lot of work on the new A2E Publisher (now in beta testing) that creates map tiles and marker layer for use in online viewers. We hope it makes publishing your ArcGIS maps online as simple and painless as possible. Here’s a small update of progress so far:

Map Viewers – A2E Publisher creates a couple of different viewers based on the consumer mapping APIs that are available right now. These systems are robust and have the added benefit of very good base data and built in geocoding for searching. We are working on getting the OpenLayers viewer up to speed but the focus right now is on the Google and MS viewers.

Florida Radar sample (3 minute export, published automatically to Amazon S3)

VE 2D

VE 3D

Google Maps

Google Earth
 

Continuous Export –  One thing to note is that A2E exports "continuous" maps, that is, it works with the ArcMap current extent directly and not through an intermediary image file. This is important when multiple map levels are created since the quality of the tiles will degrade with a single image source (what some other tile creator use). A2E, on the other hand, will continually refresh the map so that the best resolution (and scale dependent symbols) are rendered. It also means that labeling engines like Maplex or the new Cartographic Representations are fully supported.

Marker Layers - If your map contains markers (points), you can optionally export each of these layers as clickable markers in the viewers. A2E will temporarily remove the layer from the map and export it as KML. All the viewers share the same KML parsing scripts so each can view the data and display the correct marker symbol and description HTML. You can format the HTML of the markers using the same dialog that is present when exporting to Google Earth, it allows you to select which attribute fields to export and how they will look.

GMaps with KML markers
 

VE with KML markers
 

Another cool aspect of the viewers is the built in search. You can always search by lat/lng and if you have markers loaded, you can search by their name and description. Additionally, if you are using VE or GMaps you can also use the built in geocoders and search by address.

Finally, all of these examples use Amazon S3 as the backend, you can use your own servers but it is not necessary. More importantly, there is no server software needed, all of the processing happens on your desktop during the export. In this regard, it is an extremely inexpensive way to host your maps online. For instance, our last month S3 bill was only [Content].14.

more to come...

Listening To: Mew - The Zookeeper's Boy - And the Glass Handed Kites