Ancient predessors of Venice discovered.

Aerial photographs have revealed details of the ancient Roman town of Altinum, which was abandoned in favour of Venice in the early 5th Century as barbarians attacks impacted the inhabitants.

Excavate!: Ancient Roman City Rises Again via Aerial Photography

Google Mail - slow skype extension causes it

AFter a few days of agonisingly slow google mail. I found this forum discussion which identified the skype extension as the culprit!

Although it does show the problems of relying for something as crucial as email on a web based system.

Firefox 3.5 & Gmail slow - Gmail Help

Next Walk - Great Fire of London Anniversary 3rd September

Thursday 6.30 3rd September 2009
Great Fire of London Anniversary Walk
Start at Monument Underground Station

The walk traces the route of the Great Fire of London, from Pudding Lane to Cock Lane, via St Pauls and deals with the Plague, the Great Fire and the Rebuilding of London

Lead by Kevin Flude

In Their Own Words

Proof copy of 'In their Own Words' has arrived from the publishers. Falko and Valerie of Transfer Studios have done a great job designing it. It looks great!

I reread it and its ok - when you see it finished it still has a little bit of a meandering feel to it - which reflects the fact that it began as a multi-media Literary tour of London for the BBC Interactive TV Unit many years ago. Then I expanded it and used it as a course companion for my Archaeology and History of London courses, so it is a bit of a hybrid. But, actually, it has quite an up-to-date, if brief, history of London. I think it reads quite well and it does make a good introduction for someone who wants to know without reading a longer book.

I think I priced it wrong though - I was persuaded to up the price from my original thoughts of around £5, we agreed on £6.99 and I now wish I'd made it £5.99,

I am now thinking of all those other half finished articles and books and walks I have that I can now publish ......

Text Retrieval Software

I'm searching for a good text retrieval package - my ideal requirements

a. can search word, html, email and filemaker databases
b. highlights hits
c. has full boolean and proximity searching
d. allows launch of documents found in their application
e. ideally would allow open the document and finding first occurence of search string.

so far DTsearch is the nearest but it does not support filemaker or option e

• DTsearch

  text retrieval

  tags: Technology

• AFSearch in Action

  text retrieval

  tags: no_tag

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Burghley Archives visit

I went to Burghley House to give some advice on documentation systems. Always lovely to go to Stamford, and then into Burghley Park.

What a wonderful archive! I was able to look at the 9th Earl's Commonplace Book which contained his handwritten Cure for the Plague! And many other interesting and rare documents. The archivist, Rosemary, is doing a marvellous job working through them. It takes a specially organised mind not to be overwhelmed with the immensity of the task!

Burghley has developed since my last visit - it now has a nice new introductory suite with an audio visual in which past Earls, Marquis's and Lady's discuss their contribution to Burghley.

Jon took me for a walk through the amazing Garden of Surprises - inspired by Burghley's trick garden. The trick here is to see how easy it is to use water to let kids have a lot of fun!

Sculpture park is good too - all added value to one of the most amazing houses.

Burghley : Gardens & Deer Park : The Garden of Surprises

Silchester Preroman town

Salon 219 reports:

Silchester: the oldest town in Britain?
The Iron Age people of Britain tended not to go in for large town-like settlements on the whole, but our Fellow Mike Fulford has reached a point in his long-running excavations at Silchester where he thinks he has found evidence for something that looks like a thriving town laid out almost a century before the Romans occupied Britain in AD 43. In an interview with our Fellow Maev Kennedy published in the Guardian (), Mike says that Calleva Atrebatum (the Roman name for Silchester, meaning ‘the place of the Atrebates in the woods') had all the characteristics of a town whose arrival in Britain is usually credited to the Roman invaders: a regular grid of streets and narrow alleys dividing plots, supplied with water from wells and springs. The town was a wealthy place, minting its own coins and trading in luxury goods with continental Europe.

Of course, the town was not exactly ‘British’. Professor Fulford believes it was founded by Commius, leader of the Gaulish Atrebates, who fled to Britain after falling out with his former Roman allies in 50 BC. ‘The site he chose, in an area where his people probably already had links, was far enough inland to be safe from Roman galleys, on a low spur of defensible land which still has remarkable views in every direction, with ample water and surrounded by forests full of game’, says Maev. The site was subsequently redeveloped and surrounded by Roman walls in the first century AD, before being abandoned in the fifth century, its wells deliberately filled in, and never again occupied by anyone.


For boudiccan destruction of Silchester

Did Boudica destroy Silchester? � ARLT Weblog

One of the oldest Map in Europe discovered?

Stone carvings in Spain have been interpreted as an early map.

Found: A pocket guide to prehistoric Spain - science-in-society - 05 August 2009 - New Scientist

graffiti archaeology

Great site which shows graffiti walls as they change over the years.



graffiti archaeology

Roman Circus for Sale in Colchester:

Colchester: Circus gates site for sale (From Essex County Standard)

26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

• 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

  26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

  tags: ICT, multimedia

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Testing Diigo interaction with blogspot

I'm trying out Diigo, replacing Furl, as a social bookmarking site which I am trying to integrate and make sense of blog, twitter, facebook, website.

Diigo can export easily lists of bookmarked sites to twitter, blogspot and facebook.

This is an example of the output.

• Vortigern Studies Index Page

  tags: Dark, Ages, History, archaeology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Kew Gardens

Visit to Kew Gardens - one an amazing place - one of the world's precious places. I was pondering the interpretation - this is mostly done by labels and plaques - its very difficult to have any outdoor plaques that look good and Kew is no exception. The plaques are big and coloured as if for a trade exhibition. But some of them have interactives on them. They also had a sound intervention as you approach the Palace. The sound was of a carriage arriving but as it issued from the drains it really did nothing for the imagination and was just rather perplexing.

Kew Palace had a simple introductory display and video which was quite effective but really unbelievably Royalist. GIII what a good guy! Lovely kids! The rest of the house was interpreted mostly by room restored into period costume, although several empty rooms had ghostly images projected on the walls.

Lifts were cunningly built into the old guarde robe meaning they did not have to knock holes in a listed building.