Londonderry School Science Students Run the Field Lab for the State Museum

Pennsylvania's annual Archaeology Month on City Island project is one of the largest public archaeology programs in the eastern United States. Nearly 2000 grade school and middle school students visit the site during the two weeks it's open to the public every October, and many students follow along on the project's Web page http://www.statemuseumpa.org/Archaeology_on_City_Island/2000/City_Island_2000.htm  .  For most students visiting the site, the first question posed is "what are you finding?" . It's the same question generations of archaeologists have asked themselves dozens of times each day in the course of their field work. Traditionally, this question is answered in the field laboratory, where the artifacts and information encountered in the excavation are initially processed and studied. The proposed City Island Virtual Field Lab is intended to answer that question with twenty-first century technology. Middle school students from the Londonderry school, assisted by their teachers and by a multidisciplinary team of scientists and educators, will use image processing technologies; field computing, image capture, manipulation and display, to create a virtual archaeology field lab. With wireless Internet capabilities, this remote archaeological site and the images from the virtual field lab have the potential to reach innumerable school children across the country.

The goals of this project are: to create a model for the use of image processing technologies in student scientific research; to combine artifact observation, artifact attribute measurement, and image processing and manipulation to pioneer new approaches to the identification of stone, metal, and ceramic artifacts; to enhance the public education efforts of the City Island program with images captured and displayed both in the field and via Web-based access to the project and to promote and demonstrate the possibilities of careers in Archaeology and Imaging Science.

Dr. Roger Easton from Rochester Institute of Technology demonstrates techniques to Londonderry Students.

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