Meet the Team – Gareth Beale

What will you be doing at Basing House?

As well as helping to manage the every day running of the excavation I am also going to be responsible for high tech digital recording. I am going to be showing people how we use high tech recording technologies such as RTI, photogrammetry and laser scanning in archaeological fieldwork. As well as training people in their use I will also be encouraging students and staff to think creatively about the technologies and how we might use them in new or interesting ways.

What you are hoping to experience at Basing House?

As well as teaching I am also looking forward to learning a lot at Basing House. It is very rare to have the opportunity to be involved in an excavation on a site as important and complex as this one. I am particularly interested in visualisation as an archaeological technique and I am very excited about seeing how excavation and visualisation methodologies can be made to work side by side.

What’s the unique thing that attracts you to Basing House?

The complexity and multi phase nature of the site are what interest me most about it. Because of the dramatic nature of it’s destruction during the 1640′s Basing House is often thought of as a Civil War site. Actually though there is so much more here which can tell us about many periods of English history. I am especially interested in the archaeological history of the site which will make re-excavating a 1960′s trench particularly special.

What you do when you’re not at Basing House?

I am finishing up a PhD on the representation of Roman painted statuary from Herculaneum using 3D computer graphics. I am interested in the relationship between artistic and archaeological approaches to interpreting objects and have been involved in a number of projects with Nicole and researchers at Winchester School of Art. I am also working on projects at the University of Southampton which relate to data management and e-learning.

Useful links

Re-Reading the British Memorial: ourti.org

My Research Blog: http://gcbeale.tumblr.com/

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