The last two weeks have just flown by for me. My placement ended today, so now I'm taking a few days to see the sights and shoot more panos in and around York. I shall probably hire a car for the weekend (or at least one day) in order to visit some nearby castles and other medieval sites, although I'll be staying in the same B&B here in town for convenience of not having to move the luggage and find new lodging as well.

Overall the archaeological experience here has been good. Seeing how a very organized non-academic organization operates has been invaluable. Working with human skeletons, medieval pottery, and Roman brick and tile lets me see a much wider range of material for keeping in mind on future projects. Getting to meet and work with full-time field archaeologists and finds staff, even if for only two weeks, has also been worthwhile.

Today they showed me their giant (home-grown) database that has everything from every project for years and years and years in it. It has some rather annoying interface bits that certainly could use some improvement. It runs in a web browser using a ton of JavaScript and interacts with the server via PHP. Overall, though, it seems decent and no doubt they'll work out all the quirks as they go. It's available for the public to use, in part, through the YAT homepage linked above.

In about an hour we're having a BBQ, or at least a pot-luck gathering, to end the first two-week training period, when four of us depart. I'll go by the local convenience mart and get some potato salad and drinks to take over, and maybe a bag of sweets of some sort. I'll also show a demo of the fancy pano for the site I've been working on for the past couple of nights. This will look much like the site pano that I posted the other day, but will allow interactive elements like clicking the trench signs to have them appear in a readable format. I'll post that version when it's ready here as well.

Over the next few days for me, then, it's out and about, but I'll continue journaling and posting photos and panos, they just won't be about the project unless I revisit it during that time. Thursday morning it's down to London via the train and off to Italy.




This little fridge purchased last week for the project seemed so cute I named it Casper. :-)