I am teaching Disaster Anthropology during the spring semester of 2022 (January – May). This is the third time teaching the course at UCF, which examines the important part ethnographers and archaeologists play in disaster management, planning, and response. I first offered the course in 2012 at Monmouth University as a response to Hurricane Sandy. In preparation for this semester,…
Category: GIS
Creating Textured 3D Terrains (QGIS & Blender)
You’ve probably seen those cool interactive 3D models of landscapes around the web. Lots of folks are using them to illustrate various places. Perhaps you’ve even wondered, “how can I do this? It would be a great way to display my favorite site!” You know, something like the following 3D terrain of the Pinson Mounds site I use to teach…
Building the Virtual Rosewood Cemetery
This post describes the process of building the Virtual Rosewood Cemetery available at Sketchfab (see below). The online, interactive reconstruction of Rosewood’s Black burial ground is based on several digital technologies increasingly used by archaeologists. These include LiDAR, photogrammetry, ground penetrating radar (GPR), and 3D modeling. While this post isn’t a tutorial per se, it might help folks with these…
QGIS 4 Archaeology Online Course
QGIS – the world’s leading open source geographic information systems (GIS) software – has a lot to offer archaeologists and other cultural heritage workers (e.g., historians, architectural historians). QGIS is freely available online and runs on most operating systems. The following educational materials resulted from the disruption of my field school in summer 2020 due to COVID. Initially disappointed, I…
Mapping African American Travel During Jim Crow
The remarkable Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has digitized versions of their Green Book collection. These books are part of the public consciousness following the 2018 Green Book movie and will be a part of the forthcoming HBO series Lovecraft Country, based on Matt Ruff’s book of the same title. Published between 1936 and 1966, these books provided…
Teaching Archaeology with LiDAR & Sketchfab
My BA degree is from the University of Arkansas, where I was lucky enough to know Dr. Robert “Bob” Mainfort. He is well-known among Southeastern US archaeologists for his work at Pinson Mounds (and elsewhere). We once spoke about creating a 3D reconstruction of Pinson Mounds. That was 15 years ago. I never got around to it, until now! Constructing…
Simulating Storm Surge in Cedar Key
I first visited Cedar Key in 2005, during early research on Rosewood. A lot has changed since then. Some of this is the normal ebb and flow of a coastal town, some of it from increasing tourism, and some from the growing threat of sea level rise and storm surge. Much of my research uses digital technologies to interpret cultural…