News - Sticky girls "Hephing it" and happily "beeping"away at the Agora

Richard, Eva and Mette in front of the Hephaisteion – ready to work

Author: Mette Arenfeldt Christensen & Eva Mortensen

This summer we have been working at the Agora Excavations in Athens as part of the cooperation between the Zea Harbour Project and the Athenian Agora Excavations. Richard Anderson, who is the architect at the Agora, is also the "go to guy" if you want to know about modern electronic surveying. We were his assistants for almost two months, during which he taught us how to use a Leica Total Station and the powerful CAD system MicroStation. The ease and accuracy of a modern Total Station recording directly to a field computer running CAD, makes it possible to create highly accurate 3D-drawings of anything that might be found on a dig so this kind of system could be an important part of any archaeological excavation. This kind of "drawn" record scrupulously records in its correct place anything that is worthy of being recorded from delicate and ephemeral stratigraphy and finds to the "big picture" of the architecture in its topographical setting.

During our stay, Richard Anderson also had two other assistants. One of them was an American architect named Adrienne Antonucci, who was at the Agora for her second year. The other one was the architect and 3D-animator at the Zea Harbour Project, Brian Klejn-Christensen. He was, just like us, there to learn more about how surveying was actually done in the field. And we all learned (including Richard)! It was both educational and fun at the same time.

To be able to survey using this system normally requires two people. One is working with the Total Station and the other is "the sticky girl". This second person is actually the one, who decides how the structure or feature you are surveying, will look in the computerized drawing when the job is done. Richard Anderson has invented the most powerful surveying tool yet devised, which is an ordinary chopstick with a bright orange tape "flag" at one end tipped with a tiny piece of inrfa-red reflecting prismatic tape at the end. "The sticky girl" holds the "stick" with its prism exactly at the points that are sequentially "shot" and recorded by the Total Station which produces an audible beep after each shot. Thus, the "stick(y) person" "draws" in 3D whatever she (or he) chooses to draw, the "drawing" being immediately created in CAD and stored in the field computer. At the Zea Harbour Project, where most of the structures that are being surveyed are under water, the fast and elegant little stick (with no "wobble factor") is replaced by a classic EDM prism pole, but the principles are the same.

During the 2008 campaign at the Agora there were three different areas of excavation open, and we worked in all of them. They were very different from each other, which meant that the surveying "stations" were set up and their positions established in different ways. This really helped us understand the equipment itself and some of the trigonometric processes that are used by surveying. Most of our time was spent surveying near the area of the Agora site known as the "Strategeion" which had been incompletely excavated in the 1930’s. Here we surveyed many "new" walls that had appeared during initial cleaning on this year’s dig. We also filled in significant detail that was clearly missing from the various plans from earlier years. We surveyed some new and interesting things, such as a tile-lined well, a big bothros and an in situ column base and shaft, part of a building that might be the Stoa Poikile. Since Richard Anderson is usually in charge of the annual Agora t-shirt, we decided to use this column base and shaft as part of the design on the t-shirts.

When there wasn’t pressing work for us in the trenches, we worked at the Hephaisteion – we were "hephing it". Here we did sections and surveyed column "footprints" and various details in the walls. This was part of an ongoing project to gradually create an accurate "actual state" 3D model of the Hephaisteion, which Richard Anderson has been working on for several years. To be able to work in and to come to know this exquisite classical monument is very exciting!

All in all we had a very good and educational time at the Agora, where we were happily "beeping" away all summer.