Yesterday was a pretty busy day. The Larnaka Museum storeroom, where we usually work, was pretty crowded with a group of other archaeologists when we arrived. Since they plan on being there for 3 weeks we decided to work outside but did not have any tables available to us at the museum. We talked over many different plans for finding and purchasing tables, but in the end it turned out to be extremely simple. The Petrou brothers, proprietors of our hotel, have a used furniture store across the street from the hotel where they have been selling the old furniture from hotel rooms that they remodeled. As we headed out to look for tables, we decided to ask Mr. Petrou just in case and he took us across the street and let us look through the items. We found 4 tables that were a bit too small, but when we used 2 of these tables as ends with 2 wall headboards across them as planks, they worked quite well. We asked Mr. Petrou for 4 of the tables and 4 headboards (to make 2 tables) and he gave us them for free! Since the low value of the dollar has been killing us here, we were quite pleased with the cost and grateful for Mr. Petrou’s help. As an idea of cost, when we were waiting for Nick to arrive, I (having a weakness for doughnuts) bought one upstairs at the airport. It cost 2.90 euros or .US $4.46. It was a good doughnut, just not that good. Anyway, we spent the rest of the morning transporting the tables to the museum and setting them up. It took a while since we could only take 1 table at a time in our small rental car.
Later in the afternoon we took the Trimble R8 out to the field to test it out. We decided to take points every 5 steps around the perimeter of Kokkinokremos and see what happened. I took a few minutes to show Bill how to set it up and then we proceeded to take about 260 GPS points over the next hour and a half before the battery in the base station ran down – it did not have a full charge when we started. When we got back we downloaded the points and dropped them into ArcGIS and they looked pretty good, really good…..well, with one small issue, the elevation is about 20 meters off from the 1:5000 maps we have digitized.This caused some consternation and to be honest some ……. heated disagreement?… between me and Bill over what the problem was. Some Internet searching and a few phone calls to my Trimble rep later, we are still where we started. I am currently awaiting a call back from a different Trimble rep, but it seems that they have forgotten about me. We plan to work on it after dinner and feel it must be something simple that we overlooked or need to do, I hope…..
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 