Today is one of those days where every question I answer about an early medieval inscription, every letter identified leads to fifteen further questions. Who carved it? Could they read the inscription? Had they seen writing before? Did anyone check it? Why didn't they frame it first? Etc etc.
Today it's back to eroded inscriptions; tracing, and teasing individual letters out of coarse granite. Tomorrow sees me heading out for some fieldwork to clean and record another inscribed early medieval stone that also has some ogham. Will post some images once the project has been delivered!
It’s a data processing week this week. Creating a very high resolution model of an inscribed stone to analyse every bit of its surface, including some tantalising but faint markings. The fans are revving up on my main computer. My office needed warming up anyway…
Very satisfying work though! We'll never get all the answers. And we'll certainly know more than we did before. Updated description and interpretation will be added to the Historic Environment Record, with imagery, for public access.
Just tried Perplexity's AI Deep Research tool. It made up a great looking report answering my queries about literacy levels of early medieval British stonemasons. It literally made it up, including imaginary quotes from imaginary manuscripts. It didn't use the sources I gave it either. Fail!
Very sad that Dr Andy M Jones from Cornwall Archaeological Unit has died. I'd worked and co-authored a couple of papers with him. He was constantly working on projects, his brain always fizzing with ideas and connections. We planned some "one day" Cornish rock art projects. Must make them happen.
Playing with CloudCompare to compute roughness models at different levels to try and tease out more letters of a particularly eroded early medieval inscription on rough granite. Natural crystal structure is too noisy to gain more detail from depth mapping and AO. Trend surface might also work.
Some thoughts on 3D structured light scanning (SLS) for archaeologists and heritage folks. tom.goskar.com/2025/09/02/e...
Issue #12 of The Spatial Heritage Review is now live! 🔗 open.substack.com/pub/nebulous...
🖼️ Tour the Pergamon Museum.
🛥️ Shackleton’s Endurance digitised.
🕶️ XR demos.
🛠️ 3D printing & ed-tech projects.
📆 Upcoming global events, surveys, tutorials.
➕ ...& much more to discover!
#GLAM3D
Some very sad news from Cornwall. Our thoughts go to Andy’s family and friends.