The Fourth Summer School of Project RESEARCH is organized by Space Systems Solutions (S3) ltd. and will be held in Nicosia (Cyprus) from the 3rd to the 5th of October 2023. The program and information to participate will be published soon on this website.
The AMU team (Włodzimierz Rączkowski, Filip Wałdoch, Aleksandra Froehlich, Julia Lipowy, Paweł Dmitrijew, Mikołaj Kasprzak and Jan Czeski) returned to Cisowo and Dzierżęcin on March 24th – 26th to conduct their last survey on these sites. This year the weather fulfilled a well-known Polish proverb which translates roughly to: “In March like in a pot”. We experienced mainly wind and clouds, which gifted us sometimes with rainy snow, snowy hail and once heavy rain, all separated by short periods of clear sky and sun. These obviously “helpful” conditions turned the soil into gluey mud which hampered our research greatly. Despite these adversities, we managed to finish the survey on time, guided by Prof. Rączkowski (Fig. 1).
We (well, except those of us who participated in the survey for the first time) waited the whole year to be finally able to return to Cisowo and Dzierżęcin. Hundreds of vividly orange flags were prepared. The clear focus on our faces was a mere physical echo of our deeply motivated souls (Fig. 2).
As previously, we used the RTK GPS to record every visible artefact found and marked with the orange flag during our field survey(which each of us also recorded with a portable GPS) (Fig. 3,4). Sadly, but in truth after the previous season’s “failure” in this area unsurprisingly, this time we also have not found any artefacts marked with a colourful paint during the previous surveys – wrong method of marking or formation processes?
The dedication of some of the participants must be exceptionally approved. The most honourable of us willingly offered to devote to the cause their material possessions, such as cars etc… Mikołaj (Fig. 5) with his unearthly driving skills and his loyal automobile saved us from digging our way out of the road supposedly leading to the survey site in Dzierżęcin, which we relentlessly yet ineptly tried to surmount. However, later we decided to achieve our goal on foot and succeeded (Fig. 6).
Nevertheless, this way we proved that the previous manner of getting there, namely breaking through the forest, was surprisingly the easier and safer one (Fig. 7). However, we all felt that the hardships made us stronger and better researchers. Our expedition concluded with a visit to the Baltic shore – strangely though, none of us was eager to use the opportunity and swim (Fig. 8).
Now it is time to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the data collected throughout three seasons of surveying, hopefully being finally able to answer the profound question of how erosion and ploughing influence the dispersion of artefacts.
Text by Jan Czeski, Photos by AMU Team.
First day of surveying – everyone positively excited.Distribution of flags before the survey.The surveying team at work.The RTK team heading to their starting position.The car and its proud driver.The trip successfully ends.Blazing a trail in the woods.The Baltic Sea unsuccessfully waiting for brave swimmers.
The Intermediate Conference organized in the frame of Project RESEARCH by the Università degli Studi della Tuscia (UNITUS) is concluded. The organizers and Project coordinator thank all the speakers and participants for the interesting presentation and discussion!
For further details please visit the dedicated page.
The appointment with the Final Conference of the RESEARCH Project is in October 2023 in Rome (Italy).
The third Summer School organized in the frame of Project RESEARCH by the Università degli Studi della Tuscia (UNITUS) is concluded. The organizers and Project coordinator thank all the speakers and participants for the interesting lectures and discussion!
For further details please visit the dedicated page.
The next and last appointment with the RESEARCH Project Summer School is September 2023 in Limassol (Cyprus).
Project RESEARCH intermediate Conference is organized by UNITUS and will be held in Viterbo on the 3rd of November 2022. The program includes presentations about the vulnerability of archaeological heritage, hazard and risk assessment, the GIS platform built by the Project and the related archaeological database. Preliminary Project results will be illustrated by Project participants. The conference will be also an opportunity to discuss further Project developments.
If you are interested in online participation, please contact one of the organizers via e-mail (Stefano De Angeli: deangeli@unitus.it; Fabiana Battistin: fabiana.battistin@hotmail.it).
The Third Summer School of RESEARCH project will be held in Viterbo (Italy) from the 31st of October to the 2nd of November 2022.
The Summer School is organized by UNITUS, and it is designed to train young scholars and researchers, promote collaboration, bring closely the various techniques of RS for archaeological site mapping, exchange knowledge between the different fields of remote sensing and cultivate a dynamic dialogue between academia and the private sector.
Please register by contacting one of the organizers (e-mail address on the program sheet). Please, also state your preference for physical or online participation.
The Intermediate Conference of Project RESEARCH will be held in Viterbo (Italy) on the 3rd of November 2022. The program will be published in the next few days on this website.
AMU team members (Lidia on the left and Sonia on the right) measuring the artefacts in winter conditions (Photography by W. Rączkowski).
Surveying in the snow?! Yes, it is possible. From Wednesday to Saturday (11-13.03.2021), despite weather conditions, we decided it was high time for surveying areas mentioned in our project. Three sites were marked out, one in Dzierżęcin and two in Cisowo. The goal of our prospection was to find and mark artefacts visible on the ground while walking through the area. In a team of four people (Włodzimierz Rączkowski, Lidia Żuk, Filip Wałdoch and Sonia Tomczak), equipped in a GPS, each of us, we walked in the distance of stretched arms between each other to cover the area as detailed as possible. All the fragments of pottery and two pieces of glass, that we found, were marked with red dots. First, when a piece of human activity in the past, like a piece pottery, was spotted, we marked it with a flag. And then we measured their location by the use of RTK to achieve high accuracy in positioning.
Fortunately, we have marked all the pieces with flags before it started to snow. So there was no problem with finding the right spots for measurements. Snow and wind were too intense to continue surveying later this day. We went back to our base to check the results of our research.
The field in Dzierżęcin has not been cultivated for a few months and we could witness a strong animal activity there, especially traces of roe deers and boars. We have even discovered a den. Fortunately, nothing came out of it.
The next two days the weather was better and despite the strong wind, we have managed to cover the whole area between the falls of rain. The rain even helped to improve the visibility of pottery fragments on the ground. We got also a few moments of sunny weather, which didn’t really help to trace the pottery. An additional attraction was a wind farm located next to the surveyed area.
Our plan is to go back after a few months to cover the area again using the same prospection method and check if we could locate the same fragments of pottery (that is the reason behind marking them) and how they change location because of cultivation and erosion. Results might shed light on the influence of alluviation on archaeological heritage.
A den field in Dzierżęcin in winter conditions (Photograph by W. Rączkowski).
A piece of pottery marked by a flag and a red dot on the surface before measurements in Dzierżęcin (Photograph by W. Rączkowski).
AMU team members surveying a den field in Dzierżęcin (Photograph by W. Rączkowski).
Prospection on the field in Cisowo with a view on a medieval church. From the left Lidia Żuk, Sonia Tomczak, Filip Wałdoch (Photograph by W. Rączkowski).
Field in Cisowo with a view on one of the wind farms (Photograph by W. Rączkowski).
Field in Cisowo with a view on one of the wind farms (Photograph by W. Rączkowski).
On the 31st of March, RESEARCH Partners will meet for the 2nd Progress Meeting. Considering travel limitations and other issues related to Covid-19 pandemic, the Meeting will be hold on-line. The event is reserved to the Consortium.
Beside managerial and scientific issues, Partners will discuss secondment implementation issues related to the Pandemic situation, and recovery plans.
We are very proud to announce that the paper “The RESEARCH project. Soil-related hazards and archaeological heritage in the challenge of climate change”, presented at the online conference Florence HERI-TECH, The Future of Heritage Science and Technologies Conference (14-16 October 2020) has been published as part of the open-access IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering outgoing. To download the paper, please visit https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/1757-899X/949/1.