As a last stop of many journeys this summer, I was visiting the German Textiles Museum in Krefeld. In my backpack (well in my van), I had two RTI-Domes to make a photographic documentation of different types of textiles. The textiles were wonderful, but will RTI reveal something new? The museum So the German Textiles…
So I wrote about creating a course Part 1 and Part 2 already and this is Part 3. In my interdisciplinary course different student groups want to create an Archaeogame. I give the course together with my colleague from Digital Humanities. Last Monday, we had an interim meeting. The groups reported on their progress and…
So recently, I have published a new article together with Gianpiero di Maida of the Neanderthal Museum in Germany. The article is about his project called DISAPALE, but also about the comparison between a Structured Light Scanner and Structure from Motion. Wait, what? Structured Light Scanner So a structured light scanner is a device that…
A while ago, I announced that I will be co-organising a conference on decolonising orientalist narratives of the past and present. Our idea was a dialogue between “the West” and West Asia. We got many great applications, but only a few from West Asia. So we are cancelling the workshop. Our original idea Originally, we…
Although this is an older project, I never wrote anything about the burial chamber on this blog. The project happened between 2017 and 2019. It was a cooperation between the Friend’s Association of the tomb, the University of Cologne and the Technical University of Cologne. What we have done So the burial chamber is in…
The “virtual tourism company” Flyover Zone published a (for now) free VR application called Baalbek Reborn: Temples. As a Near Eastern archaeologist and VR enthusiast, I naturally had to try it out. I did and have to say, that although it looks quiet nice, I am underwhelmed. Let’s try to figure out why. Baalbek So…
Recently I read a book about dirt. Not the kind of dirt that I as an archaeologist have to deal with, but more the philosophical kind. Mary Douglas describes in her book “Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo” how what is considered to be unclean is culturally dependent. The whole book is interesting in itself, but I am concerned with the cleanliness of 3D reconstructions and how unclean they actually need to be.
Together with my colleagues from the University of Bochum, Bärbel Morstadt and Aydin Abar, as well as the University of Leiden, Aris Politopoulos, I am organising a three-day digital conference in 2022 called “West Asia in the Center”. I will be about colonialism in the study and depiction of the past and present of West…
There have been a lot of videogames with the iconic archaeologist Dr. Indiana Jones and I already talked about one of them. Atari released the first game however in 1982. That was one year after the screening of the very first Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). It was produced for the…
Doing book reviews for volumes is hard, as I can’t go deep into every single article. So I won’t do that and talk about the general idea behind this volume instead. The volume is a collection of articles concerned with the reception of the Ancient Near East. In other words how the idea of an…