The 2012 Gurob Harem Palace Project Conference

The 2012 Gurob Harem Palace Project Conference, which was organised jointly with the University of Liverpool Ancient Worlds Summer School, took place at the University of Liverpool on Sunday 29 July 2012. 

The programme was as follows:

1. The latest news from our 2012 fieldwork – Ian Shaw (University of Liverpool)
2. Recording the 2011-12 looting at Gurob – Anna Hodgkinson (University of Liverpool)
3. Gleanings from Gurob: Reinvestigation and Redisplay at the Manchester Museum – Dr Campbell Price (Curator of Egypt & Sudan, Manchester Museum)
4. Gurob’s trade with the Aegean – Dr Valentina Gasperini (University of Bologna)
5. Faience bowls and amulets at Gurob – Dr Tine Bagh (Curator, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)
6. Culture of Beauty in an Egyptian Palace – Dr Ole Herslund (University of Copenhagen)
7. Queen Mary's Spoon? – Jan Picton and Ivor Pridden (University College London);
8. Objects in focus in the Garstang Museum – studying Gurob-related objects.

Please see the GHPP website for paper abstracts and Egyptological.com a detailed report by Andrea Byrnes.

Hannah's Egypt photos

The Colossi of Memnon by Hannah Pethen

My friend, fellow PhD student and team member at Gurob, Hannah Pethen, has recently uploaded a vast amount of fantastic photos to her Flickr photo stream.
These images depict many archaeological sites in Egypt, from Cairo to Assuan, most of which are published under a creative commons license. Thus they form a fantastic pictorial corpus for any Egyptologist.
In addition, Hannah has uploaded some great scenes of daily life and landscape in Egypt, which she captured during her travels. She has written an article about her travels in Egypt and her pictorial inspirations.

Follow Hannah on Twitter for photo-updates and and tweets on ancient Egypt!

Sponsor Anna - Running for Gurob Fieldwork

On 12 February 2012 I will be running the Southport Maddog 10k in order to raise funds for the 2012 Gurob Harem Palace project's fieldwork season. I would be extremely grateful for your sponsorship!

Total Open Station (TOPS) 0.3 Released

A new edition of the open source software for the downloading and processing of archaeological survey data has been released today!
TOPS runs on any operating system, including mobile platforms like OpenMoko, and it is designed to support as many devices and formats as possible, all within the same program, opposed to having one program per device.

TOPS can be downloaded from here, documentation is also available.

TOPS has been succesfully tested and used at Gurob. The only drawback at the moment is the lack of support for line data, however, this feature is planned to be included in future!

Gurob Harem Palace Project Conference - part 2

The conference report, written by Birgit Schoer, is now online! Please have a look at the Project website!


I have furthermore uploaded some more photos from the event to a Picasa album! I hope you enjoy them!

Gurob Harem Palace Project Conference 2011

A conference on our fieldwork at Gurob was held November 4th and 5th at UCL, London to discuss recent fieldwork results of the Gurob Harem Palace Project and raise funds for future seasons. I have produced a short Twitter summary of the tweets produced mainly by Liz and myself using the #GHPP hashtag and a few RTs.

I will soon upload some pictures to the website.

In the meantime, please consider becoming a friend of the Gurob Harem Palace Project and sponsor great fieldwork!

The British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal - how to fundraise

As I already wrote in the previous post, I will be running the Liverpool Women's 10k THIS SUNDAY in order to raise funds for the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal.

Using the Justgiving.com website for fundraising should have been a lot easier, but we came across some problems, which is why I thought I'd post the relevant info here:

When setting up one's fundraising page on justgiving.com one can either select an event or a personal challenge, etc. - then you select your charity of choice. Now, it is NOT possible to directly select the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal. Instead, you should select the British Red Cross (without any further specifications) as your charity and then complete the steps to finish setting up your page.
Once this is done, you should email challenges@redcross.org.uk with the address of your justgiving website and ask them to code the page up to that the funds go directly to the Japan Tsunami Appeal.
You can also contact your local British Red Cross office and ask them to do the same. They will also be able to inform you about the logistics and requirements of any other fundraising activities you are planning in your area.

One-of donations can be made directly to the BRC Japan Tsunami Appeal, however, this might not suit your fundraising needs if you are collecting money over a longer period of time and rely on people donating for a particular event.

I would be extremely grateful for any donations made for Japan! The run on Sunday is not the only one I will be doing, I am intending to participate in the Liverpool Tunnel 10k (June 12th 2011) as well, and my page will remain open. Donations can be made here - Thank you so much! :)

Running for Japan

On May 8th 2011 I will be running the Liverpool Women's 10k in order to raise money for the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal.

This is a very important cause and I am hoping to raise as much as possible to help the people in Japan who have lost everything.

I am part of a team of students at Liverpool University, working together for this cause.

Please give generously! I am very grateful for your donations!

Link to my Justgiving.com page

Current Research in Egyptology 2009: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Symposium published!

The tenth annual Current Research in Egyptology conference was held at the University of Liverpool in January 2009 and welcomed Egyptology graduates from all over the world. (Oxbow Books 2011)

The proceedings include my own article, Mass-Production in New Kingdom Egypt: The Industries of Amarna and Piramesse, which discusses an aspect of my PhD research.

Guide: Helmert (two-point) transformation in Quantum GIS

I have written a quick guide on using the Helmert georeferencing method in Quantum GIS. The summary can be read below and you can download it from here.
A big thanks to Conan Parsons (Oxford Archéologie Méditerranée) who pointed this out to me! :)

This quick guide is intended to guide the reader through the Helmert georeferencing
method, which is available in the plugin repository of open source desktop GIS package Quantum GIS.
The guide has been written mainly for an archaeological audience, as it is still common practice to offset plans of archaeological features using no more than two points, usually the section drawing points, which are surveyed.
The plans would then be scanned and referenced to the site data for digitisation using a two-point transformation in CAD software.
Until recently open source GIS packages, the use of which is becoming increasingly
popular within archaeology, have not been able to reference raster images using only two points, but required a minimum of three points for (usually polynomial) georeferencing.
This is undisputedly the most accurate method of georeferencing, however the offsetting and survey of additional points is time-consuming, which is not ideal on archaeological sites. Hence, proprietary CAD software still had to be regularly used for two-point transformations of archaeological site plans.
Now the excellent open source GIS package QGIS contains this tool within its georeferencing plugin and thus provides another reason not to use proprietary CAD software for archaeological spatial data.