The future for virtual reality: part two

Esquire IMAX in Sacramento, California

This is the closest most of us get to experiencing virtual reality,

but more importantly, in this context, such theatres are almost

all that has survived of the enormous theatres of yesteryear

where the immensity of the architecture and the inner space

contributed, psychologically, to the greatness of Hollywood

and helped turn its stars into something akin to royalty. Will

the far more immersive experience of this VR do something
similar in the future when the technology approaches that
of the Star Trek Holodeck? Only time will tell.

photo: Justin Smith

Before donning the headset of the developer's kit for the forthcoming Oculus Rift Q1, Nigel was curious about whether I would need my reading glasses or not (I am far-sighted), and so was I. After a brief experiment with and without, I settled for wearing them, but what I was looking at was virtually at a distance that I would not need glasses to see clearly. Nevertheless, I felt that my sense of vision was being altered, somewhat, by the experience. I would like to experiment more, especially in being able to look at something from a very close virtual distance.

I am sitting in a large theatre which reminds me of the cinemas I knew when I was a young kid. There are the dimmed lights on the walls and the line of small floor lights that reveal the theatre aisles. I can feel the size of the place, just as I remember from back then. Looking down, Nigel's office chair has been transformed into a different chair. I lean downward and see the texture of the carpet on the floor of the theatre and as I look around the illusion is maintained: I feel that I am really there. There is an old black and white movie playing on the screen.

But I am not here to watch the movie, and as I have that thought, my chair suddenly starts sliding to the right and I find myself sitting in the middle of the aisle. Then I begin to travel down the aisle, into another dark space where the same theatre screen is duplicated many times with the movie still playing, and the aisle floor lights still marking the path.

I am outside! It is clear night with no moon and the stars shine brightly in the velvet sky. It seems to be a gigantic storage yard of some kind with alien-looking curved rectangular containers are parked in many rows [simple to duplicate in VR, must have made the development kit cheaper to produce, but a nice effect, anyway] The sky is just light enough, near the ground, to see the outlines of trees around the yard. This must be on the edge of town. The chair continues to move forward.

What is this? I find myself still in the same chair sitting motionless in a modern, well lit, office building. It must be the main floor because the space is very large.Then the chair moves forward again. Suddenly, I am at the edge of a precipice. This is not like being at a shopping mall on an upper floor with its glass fence and a rail so that you do not risk falling to the ground below. This floor just stops. I feel a slight sense of vertigo, I am not one for great heights with nothing between me and what lies below. Then I start moving downward and the experience is identical to being in a glass-walled elevator, but there is no glass. I do not feel any vertigo because the elevator experience comes to the foreground of my consciousness.

I find myself, still in the same chair, in a room. It seems like something from a David Lynch movie with the emotional darkness of Mulholland Drive; an inner-city tenement room that had recently been vacated by the squatters who had lived there. It is grungy, but there are a few new cardboard packing boxes on the floor, contrasting with the stained twin-sized mattress that still remains. Perhaps the movers were reluctant to touch it. I half expect to see used heroin needles here and there, too. I really want to get up from my chair and explore this room. Does it even have a door? Now I start to feel contained by the room. I am reminded of my late wife, Carin Perron's, sestina The Room:

It is dim. It grows dark as I stand in a room.

Something is with me. I don't dare to look

Through the space of such quiet. There is a voice,

A voice I can't hear. I stumble: a book

Is here with me. It rests on the floor; near it, a face

Turns slowly towards me. I search for the volume:

Down in the dark there are words without volume.

I don't stand alone with the voice in this room --

The book is below me -- between us, the face

Hovers darkly before me and dares me to look

Through the grate of its eyes, and reach for the book.

The book makes a sound: it's the sound of a voice.

I'm alone in a room with a face and a voice.

I kneel without looking and grope for the volume;

Nothing is safe here: I must have the words of this book.

Silence fills volumes of dark in this room,

And silent, I move: my fingers must look

Alone, through the blackness, to pierce through that face....

I am three inches tall and in a refrigerator. The door is closed but the light is still on. Looking around, I see fruits and vegetables, a rack of eggs and a couple of full milk bottles (are bottles still used?) but no left-overs or (thankfully) any "science experiment" at the back of a shelf. The only named product is Boursin cheese. The name is getting too much attention. [Is this a paid sponsorship in the kit which hopes for cravings by VR developers? Is it to get the idea across that VR might be a suitable medium for advertising as television viewing diminishes because of Netflix?]

A yellow tape slides out from below me. At first I think it might turn into some sort of flying carpet to take me on a tour, but it then makes a serpentine motion and takes the form of a roller-coaster path. I ride on it through fruits and vegetables, sometimes through gaps between them, and once, an onion rolls out of my way to allow me to pass. My stomach tells me that I am on a real roller coaster at a fairground. It is obviously not in communication with my eyes. It is great fun.

After I removed the headset and saw the real office again; Nigel, Jasmin, and my grandchildren (all of whom had largely vanished from my consciousness during the experience), I had only one thought: "I want one!"

Tomorrow, the mind behind the machine, and much more.

John's Coydog Community page

The future for virtual reality: part one

Oculus Development Kit 2 headset for their forthcoming Q1

The headset is not a stand alone device: it is powered by your

computer as this technology requires considerable processing

ability. The development kit came with the samples of VR that

I experienced that morning.

photo: Rebke Klokke (Partij van de Arbeid)

Last Sunday, I was having breakfast at a restaurant with my daughter, son in law, and my grandchildren. I often discuss advances in technology with Nigel (my son in law) as he is a "tech guy" and that morning the topic moved to virtual reality. He asked me if I would like to experience the newest development in virtual reality: the latest developer's model for the Oculus Rift Q1. which is planned to be released to the public as a product next year. There was one at his office just a few blocks away from the restaurant.

I really did not need any persuasion as I have been enthusiastic about virtual reality since 1969 when I saw the Rod Steiger movie, The Illustrated Man which was based on a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury, published in 1951. The story in question was The Veldt.

When we got to Nigel's office, he had me sit in a chair as the motion in the virtual reality samples could cause my body to attempt to compensate and people have actually fallen over because of this effect. This is not to be confused with the motion sickness experienced by the more primitive technology (of the last couple of years!). The Q1 has eliminated that effect which, visually, is seen by the unrealistic curvature you see at certain angles in such technology together with the rainbow effect at the edges of objects at such angles. There was no strange warping nor rainbowed edges in the VR samples I experienced (saw would be the wrong word as the experience involved much more than just sight: my body was convinced that I was really there but, intellectually, I knew I was not. The experience was more like a dream, but far more realistic than any dream I have ever had. It engaged me completely: in one scene, I really wanted to get out of the chair to walk around it, but a split second later I realized that I would be bumping into chairs and desks at Nigel's office. You would really need a big empty room to do that. Such a thing would be great for a basement development, as there would be no need to buy furnishings. Of course, your computer would have to be out of the way, too.

Tomorrow, in part two,  I will take you through the experience and share what I saw, what my body experienced, and the thoughts that came to me during this remarkable event. Parts of it will seem like the description of  dreams or something out of surrealist literature. Subsequent parts will investigate the medium from other viewpoints. In the meantime, explore the links I give and start planning that basement renovation!

John's Coydog Community page

On ebooks and their readers

"For your homework, I want an essay on the subject matter

of location 303 on your Kindle app textbook and I expect

to see it in my email inbox by 9 p.m. tonight."
Composite by JH done with Fauve Matisse (public domain)

I am sold on ebooks. I first started giving them serious thought when I learned that Princeton had published their Collected Works of C. G. Jung as a complete digital edition. I had previously purchased a number of his books from the series in paperback, so I have added to my Jung library by purchasing individual titles from the Princeton digital series. You do save quite a bit by purchasing the complete digital edition but as I did not really need much on the practice of psychoanalysis, buying just what I needed to add to my Jung library seemed like a better choice. I did pay almost $100 for one title, though: these are not the sort of ebooks that you can buy for 99 cents each! The paperbacks all have an index, anyway. Mind you, the text search that is possible on the Kindle app on my Samsung tablet has far greater functionality. The complete digital edition would cost me just over $500. Sometime, I might buy it anyway as I expect (hope?) it would searchable as a single book. That is one level of functionality that should be commoner in ebook readers. If I had the Kindle device, it would be possible to search for word or phrases across my entire Kindle library, but the app on my tablet does not have such a feature and I can only search within the book that is open.

I just downloaded an app for doing the sort of text search that you can do within your document files in Windows 7 as it was purported to work with ebooks, but having tried it, I see it only works with books in PDF format. I will keep looking for an alternative. if you do know of such an app, please leave me a comment.

I also have an app, and have purchased books in Google Play and it has a similar sort of search function as my Kindle app. If I had just purchased a proprietary ebook reader I would be restricted to its own publications and I would not be able to listen to my Google Play music while reading my Kindle without having to take more than one device with me on a journey. Besides, I like the screen resolution on my Samsung 7'" tablet and it fits nicely in my jeans back pocket.

Not all ebooks are created equal: I decided to buy the ebook version of Vincent Megaw's 80th birthday Festschrift but was annoyed that Oxbow Books was too lazy to produce a properly formatted ebook and the layout is in two columns. A problem that seems common to ebooks is that while you can enlarge the text, or just magnify the screen (which is more useful), you cannot zoom into pictures or diagrams. Jung has a few diagrams that are just too small, even when I am wearing my reading glasses. Google Books is better in that respect because you can enlarge the illustrations. This is perfect for the older books without dreadful half-tone pictures. As a writer, I also like to be able to select and copy text for quotes, but the Kindle Cloud Reader does not allow you to do such and I have to use my tablet app for that and then use Dropbox on my desktop computer to access the quote.

There are also more mundane advantages to having a portable elibrary: you can find more people to help you move house, for example and you will not have to make trips to Ikea for more bookcases (right now I have no room for more, anyway). I also wish that schools would use only etextbooks, too, that way there would be more room on the bus when I inadvertently board one when school kids are also boarding with their oversized backpacks full of textbooks.

Tomorrow, how I got see the future after breakfast on Sunday.

John's Coydog Community page

Physics and metaphysics: the stuff that dreams are made of

The stuff that dreams are made of, John Anster Fitzgerald (1819-1906), oil on canvas, 1858

Continuing from yesterday about the Pauli/ Jung letters: Jung devoted quite a lot of ink to Wolfgang Pauli's dreams, so I found Pauli's essay, Modern Examples of Background Physics, especially interesting for his views on the nature of dreams. In a long letter of 31 March 1953 Pauli says:

"When you say that "the psyche is partly of a material nature,"⁷ Then for me as a physicist this takes on the form of a metaphysical statement. I prefer to say that psyche and matter are governed by common, neutral, "not in themselves ascertainable" ordering principles. (Unlike the psychologist, the physicist has no problem, for example, with saying "the U field" instead of "the unconscious," which would thus establish the"neutrality" of the concept.)

 "⁷ Your letter, p. 6. This statement seems to me alarmingly close to the definitely meaningless statement that "everything is psychic"! For "psychic" to acquire any meaning, there must also be something nonpsychic involved, and this is where the "not in itself ascertainable" seems to me suitably neutral."

We see in the above a foreshadowing of David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, yet in that work, Pauli gets no mention at all, neither does the Unus Mundus. Bohm does not mention Jung, either, but Bohm obtained many of his ideas about the psyche from Jiddu Krishnamurti. It should be mentioned, however, that Jungian Marie-Lousie Von Franz does refer to Bohm and to Wholeness and the Implicate Order in her (1988) Psyche and Matter.

In his (also long) reply, Jung says:

"You are perfectly correct when you say that my remark concerning the material nature of the psyche is a metaphysical judgement. It was, of course, not meant as such and is not to be taken literally. The remark is simply intended to point out that the nature of the psyche is involved in both hypothetical conceptions, spirit and material, and, like them, is not ascertainable. The aim of the remark is to indicate that whenever something material exists, the psyche is also partially involved. When it comes to the overall judgement, the following sentence needs to be added: Wherever the spiritual exists, the psyche has its part to play. This participation is ascertainable in that there are conceptions that are labeled partly as spiritual and partly as of material origin. But just what form this participation actually takes cannot be ascertained because material, psyche, and spirit are in themselves of an unknown nature and thus are metaphysical or postulated. Thus I fully agree when you say "that psyche and matter are governed by common neutral etc. ordering principles." (I would simply add "spirit" as well.)

"Under these circumstances, I simply fail to see—with the best will in the world—how psychology can be "overburdened" with me, or what form an expansionist tendency of my concept of the psyche is supposed to take."

Following Markus Fierz' comments from yesterday,  he says of Pauli's essay: "...Pauli refers to it as an outline—but actually an attempt to come to grips with a problem that had always preoccupied him. What he had in mind was "a description of nature integrating both physis and psyche.""

In Tertium Organum, Ouspensky says:

"...according to Kant, everything that we find in things is put in them by ourselves. Independently of ourselves we do not know what the world is like. And our cognition of things has nothing in common with the things as they are outside of us—that is, in themselves. Furthermore, and most important, our ignorance of things in themselves does not depend upon our insufficient knowledge, but is due to the fact that by means of sensuous perception we cannot know the world correctly at all. That is to say, we cannot truly declare that although now we perhaps know little, presently we shall know more, and at length shall come to a correct understanding of the world. It is not true because our experimental knowledge is not a confused perception of a real world. It is a very acute perception of an entirely unreal world appearing round about us at the moment of our contact with the world of true causes, to which we cannot find the way because we are lost in an unreal "material" world. For this reason the extension of the objective sciences does not bring us any nearer to the knowledge of things in themselves, or of true causes.

"In A Critique of Pure Reason Kant affirms that:

"Nothing which is intuited in space is a thing in itself, and space is not a form which belongs as a property to things; but objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and what we call outward objects are nothing else but mere representations of our sensibility, whose form is space, but whose real correlated thing in itself is not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made.

"The things which we intuit are not in themselves the same as our representation of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us; and if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time disappear, but even space and time themselves...."

Have a great weekend and think about these things, or not, because if you don't mind, it doesn't matter

John's Coydog Community page

Physics and metaphysics: the Pauli/Jung letters

The young Wolfgang Pauli

I recently finished reading Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932-1958, English edition, edited by C. A. Meier with a preface by Beverley Zabriskie, Princeton University Press, 2001.

As with nearly all books, I read the preface (and/or introduction) last. I find that doing so avoids any expectations that I might look for in reading the entire work which might alter my perceptions accordingly. It also reveals what I might have missed, giving me reason to question why I did so. An exception to this practice is another book I have started reading for the second time: T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, where his own introduction sets the stage to understanding the Arab cultures and political background of his time, and is seven chapters long (people thinking about current problems in the middle-east should read this, too!).

I shared, with Beverley Zabriskie, a wonder at whose words I was reading at many points in their communications: sometimes, Pauli was talking psychology; sometimes Jung was talking physics. Jung's letters were often more complex than his published writing as his audience, in the letters, was a man often very familiar with his works as well as knowing Jung, personally, for many years. It surprised me, too, to read about dinners with Albert Einstein where the host was neither Einstein nor Pauli, but Jung.

Pauli's relationship with Albert Einstein was rather different: more professional and respectful than friendly. It was Pauli who successfully interpreted some of Einstein's research to a public and scientific community unprepared for it; It was Einstein who nominated Pauli for his Nobel Prize and once said of him: "He is the best of us".

But there is more in this book than letters and introductory essays: Appendix 3 is an unpublished essay by Wolfgang Pauli of which Markus Fierze says in Comments on Appendix 3 (op.cit. Appendix 2):

"A typewritten copy of the following essay by Pauli—"Modern Examples of 'Background Physics'"—was found among the correspondence with Jung; apparently, Pauli wanted to send it to Jung. The essay was never published and is undated."

Fortunately, you can read this essay, online, for yourself. So that you can share my experience of reading a work prior to any introductory explanation, I will let you to do just that and conclude, tomorrow, not just with more from Fierze, but from Jung and Pauli's letters and I will also add something from P. D. Ouspensky (Пётр Демья́нович Успе́нский), Tertium Organum with its quotes from Immanuel Kant .


John's Coydog Community page

Dean Crawford — Living among the Dobunni: conclusion

Edward the Confessor silver penny of Snel at Chester

photo: Dean Crawford

First of all, I must thank Dean for agreeing to contribute so much about his metal-detecting career and his research over the years to this blog series. It is his contributions, not my own, that have made this series so popular and it continues to rise in the ratings. Expect more of his posts besides "fragmentation" to appear in the left column as Google catalogues them and people search for useful information and rich content. I also thank Thelma for her comment to yesterday's post as she expresses exactly what I had hoped, but did not expect, the series to achieve. I appreciate, too, the comments in previous posts by Wayne Sayles and John Howland that mention more collaborations between detectorists and archaeologists. Both groups are often reluctant to speak out for fear of being bullied in the blogosphere, the worst of the medium being heir to the flame wars of the Usenet in "olden tymes". I give the link for the benefit of my younger readers, many of whom were not even born when it was at its height. I see it actually still exists.

In this final post I am showcasing Dean's favourite coin find with his data:

"Edward the Confessor (1042-1066) silver penny.

Obv: EDRAR .DEC 

Rev: SN / ELON / LEGE / CES

The moneyer is Snel and the mint is Chester.

This is the first PACX coin of Snel to be recorded, filling in a gap in his career, which extends from Quatrefoil to Radiate Small Cross types.

EMC number 1997.0040."

This is the sort thing that makes Dean's work so valuable as so many important coins are found as stray finds and not in hoards or at archaeological digs.

My own hope for the future is that similar blog  entries and articles will appear and start to give a more accurate view of the current, and potential relationships between detectorists and archaeologists. Such a balanced view is desperately needed. The web needs less sensationalism and more of the useful data such as what Dean has supplied here. Nothing can compare to the local knowledge gained over many years by detectorists and local amateur historians who are both driven by passion and not career opportunities.

I will be back tomorrow with something new (I have no idea, yet, on what that will be!)

John's Coydog Community page

Dean Crawford — Living among the Dobunni: Dean's reflections and summation

Dean Crawford

"I have enjoyed sharing my experiences here, many thanks to John. It has brought back plenty of memories! It has also highlighted how quickly things change over time. Thanks, too, for the private messages from the readers of this blog series. I have been very lucky, apparently.

"Perhaps this is due to the start I was given in life and I can only thank my parents for that. When I say that, I don't mean so much in a financial sense, although they have always helped me way above and beyond the call of duty.

"Having been self employed since I left school, I have always had the freedom to do and express how I feel, without the fear of any repercussion unfairly affecting myself or my career. Always free thinking — not suppressed or tied to any required mindset or ideology. This will never change, it is nice to communicate in a way without any animosity or prejudice toward others with a difference of opinion.

"The hobby of metal detecting is complex. Like archaeology itself, there is much opinion and  criticism directed at the methods and people involved. Always a little horror story to tell, or be heard, but there are so much more positive things to be enjoyed and to learn from.

"I do not wish to control others, as I do not wish others to control me. But yet some of the fallacious views surrounding my pastime attempts to do just that, so I know how it would feel, should I be naïve enough to try this in other people's circles.

"I would never attempt to interfere in other peoples lives, with hard opinions concerning their affairs —  opinions that could never be formed accurately from outside. One needs to be inside the theatre to view the performance, to fully understand the story —  the whole experience, before passing comment or criticism. To do so from afar would simply highlight one's ignorance. To make a career out of it would make you a idiot. But we accept that the world is a big place and this does happen!

"Positive communication and sharing personal experiences are good and  we can learn from these things.
I am free to speak on the subject of metal detecting in the UK, and most importantly, from personal experience. Mature criticism is not only invited, it is very important to me for improvement, but only from those who also like to listen and learn. This is how we move forward.

"I have been lucky to have found many unique and rare objects that have filled gaps in our knowledge. I am also glad to have helped others such as archaeologists and numismatists in the study of our past. I will continue as I have done —  making finds, looking to understand, study and record them, wherever I feel the information will do its best for all of us."

Dean Crawford

Tomorrow will be the last episode: my own summation of this series.

John's Coydog Community page

Dean Crawford — Living among the Dobunni: Karl Jackson and his Eisu gold staters

The three Dobunni gold staters of Eisu

photo: Dean Crawford

"These three Dobunni staters were found by my colleague and best
friend Karl Jackson, on a large Roman settlement in South
Worcestershire. All three coins were found close to the surface; two were found nearly a hundred yards apart and one coin from a different field entirely, albeit within throwing distance of one of the other coins. These were recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), although I cannot find them in their database!

Dean's associated finds from the site: found over

twenty years and in three fields.

photo: Dean Crawford

"Associated finds were 1st century AD Roman, with evidence of later 3rd-4th century occupation further to the south. Some Roman Republican denarii, quite worn, were also found over the twenty years. Karl had searched this site — we always find worn Roman Republic coins with our Celtic coins and usually 1st century denarii.  As usual, all these coins were found near the surface in the plough soil.

"This area of South Worcestershire is where I met Karl, a dedicated detectorist and loyal friend. We had many a day out and weekends away on our searches.

"Karl was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away in October 2013. He is now back in his favourite spot as I scattered his ashes there, as was his wish.

"We chatted often about our Dobunni coins, great finds, great moments and memories. So here are Karl's three Dobunni Eisu gold Staters.

"What I have learned living and detecting in the area of the Dobunni is that certain types of these coins tend to be found more in particular areas; I have seen that Bodvoc and Corio seem to be found more central and quite widespread, Anted central and further south, Eisu central and further north, Catti to the west. In fact, I have seen hundreds of Dobunni coins found and not one inscribed coin of Catti was found east of the river Severn, although I believe that they have been found in this area.
.

"These coin find spots are only through my personal experience, so are just observations, and I am not sure whether they conflict with any detailed analysis and present knowledge on the subject.

"As for their dating, Eisu seems to be latest. These coins are often found with coins of Nero, Vitellius and even Vespasian. The later they are, the more debased they become. Again, just observations, based on my own experience and that of others, when considering the associated finds, and lack of earlier and later finds to suggest otherwise."


John's Coydog Community page

Dean Crawford — Living among the Dobunni: a story of a wasted opportunity

A pair of Anglo-Saxon saucer brooches found in topsoil that

had been removed from an archaeological site prior to

recording and spread on a local farmer's field.

photo: Dean Crawford

"One of my colleagues has spent most of his life metal detecting the fields around Bidford on Avon, Warwickshire, meticulously recording all his finds. Hundreds of his Anglo Saxon finds have greatly enhanced what we know about the area at that time and a massive amount of numismatic information has been gleaned from his coin finds.

"About twenty five years ago, archaeological excavations were carried out behind the Anglo-Saxon public house in Bidford. The archaeologists were asked by my colleague, Jim, if he could assist, if only by scanning the discarded topsoil. The answer was a defiant NO. What a wasted opportunity.

"If the archaeologists had as much knowledge of the area as Jim, they would have known that the site in question was disturbed in the nineteenth century, so a great deal of what they would had been looking for would already be unstratified and possibly nearer the surface. Yet, a deep layer of topsoil was stripped and discarded.

"By a strange coincidence, this topsoil was immediately shipped out in large trucks and dumped onto the nearby farm, where Jim actually had permission from the landowner. So he did get to scan the spoil after all.

"What he found was quite amazing; many late Roman and Anglo-Saxon finds. One has to wonder how this would have confused any future investigation on this nearby land. Or would it? perhaps the archaeologists would discard the topsoil for a second time, and dump it on a third farm? and continue on like this.

"A disturbed context, or not, there was so much knowledge and information lost by the archaeologists using this method. Yet Jim scanned the discarded soil, recorded all the Roman coins, Roman brooches, Anglo-Saxon Sceats and important brooches. The last time I spoke to Jim, he had recorded at least sixty early Anglo-Saxon coins, including many new varieties according to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. [these would have been recorded in the Department of Coins and Medals' Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds]

"I only posses one photograph from back then: two large Anglo-Saxon saucer brooches that he found in the soils that were transferred from the excavation site, which would have certainly been from a grave.

"If only those archaeologists had not been influenced by their prejudices and outdated education. My message to archaeologists and people still with this mindset is to think outside the box. Don't blindly believe everything you are told; question everything; and use your own intuition. Only then can we move forward from the old ignorant ways.

John's Coydog Community page

Dean Crawford — Living among the Dobunni: more archaeological work

Excavation at the Wyre-Piddle Bypass
photo: Dean Crawford

Before I start with today's topic, I must apologize to anyone who clicked on the link to the Throckmorton excavation report and got the wrong file. Unfortunately no excavation report appears to be online, not even at the Archaeology Data Service. In its place is now just a general overview of the site. On a more positive note, I spoke about the "more on fragmentation" post last night to my friend Robert Kokotailo of Calgary Coin Gallery, and he told me that he had been planning, this weekend, to do an article on coin metal crystallization as part of his coin reference pages. He purchased an ancient Greek silver coin which had been broken by someone who had dropped it on a hard floor exposing its crystalline interior. You cannot, of course, see such a thing by sawing a coin in half as the surfaces exposed are new and appear quite smooth. To study the interior, a coin must be broken with a hammer. Although fine quality silver is malleable, after about a thousand years it starts to recrystallize. You can see this effect often with the chips and fractures common on Anglo-Saxon coins but it does not appear on coins of the the later Medieval period onward. This means, of course, that these later coins, if left in the ground will also start to disintegrate. This effect being increased when the position of the coin changes in the ground and especially so when it gets closer to the surface through a number of agencies such as farming activity, removal and transference of top soil. or wildlife activity.

Dean's finds from different periods at the

Wyre-Piddle Bypass excavation

photo: Dean Crawford

We start with the excavation at the Wyre-Piddle Bypass site. You can see that quite a range of periods are represented here including a couple of fragments of La Tène 2 or 3 brooches (wrought, not cast). It would be most likely that these brooches were made not too far away from the site.

Romano-British enamel

photo: Dean Crawford

Next comes the 2011 Trial trenching and WB at Redhill Reservoir, Telford by Worcestershire Archaeological Service. Of the find photographs Dean sent me, I chose this example because I used to own a small disc brooch of similar design. It displays a Celtic triskele with red enamel comma-shaped voids.

Anglo-Saxon silver-gilt disk
photo: Dean Crawford

This splendid silver-gilt disk with its spiral and triquetra design from Childswickham, Worcestershire must have belonged to a very high-status visitor. It is also illustrated (figure 28) in the excavation report. Very little evidence of Anglo-Saxon presence is noted in the report.

Roman denarius of Faustina Junior

photo: Dean Crawford

Finally,  Dean also worked on the archaeological site at Malvern, Worcestershire and he is given credit and his finds are listed in the excavation report.







John's Coydog Community page