Modeling, Mobile GIS, and Virtual Reality in the Historic Burying Grounds of Greater Boston

Presenter: Jason Ur, Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard

Abstract: Since 2005, I have been taking Harvard College students into Cambridge’s old burying ground, the only place of burial for Cambridge’s inhabitants for its first two centuries. During the pandemic, I shifted my research focus to this historical landscape, and have since used it as a venue for testing new applications in 3-D modeling, drone based remote sensing, and crowdsourced mobile GIS. Most of these applications rely on the Esri ArcGIS ecosystem and may have applications for the wider Harvard GIS community.

Speaker's Bio: Jason is the Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard.  He specializes in early urbanism, landscape archaeology, and remote sensing, particularly the use of declassified US intelligence imagery.  He has directed field surveys in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.  He is the author of  Urbanism and Cultural Landscapes in Northeastern Syria: The Tell Hamoukar Survey, 1999-2001 (2010).  Since 2012, he has directed the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey, an archaeological survey in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq.  He is also preparing a history of Mesopotamian cities.  Jason is also a former director of the Center for Geographic Analysis.

Lunch will be served to those in attendance.  

To attend remotely, please register at this Zoom link