A half drunk glass of beer with a picture of a gnome sporting a long, white beard and a fetching red hat. One of several beers sampled at the excellent St Huberts cafe/bar in Ghent, Belgium.

Fun and highly informative few days in Ghent attending the international conference on archaeological prospecting #ICAP2025

If you couldn't attend and would like to read the extended abstracts you can find them here:

journals.openedition.org/archeoscienc...

My hands are very sore and stiff and my concentration is wonky so I will likely not add much further today, apologies. The talks this afternoon continue the CRM/ sci coms and social value thread and then we'll go into the ISAP AGM which I can't post about anyway! #icap2025

Apologies for lack of posts (53rd paper of 58 since 09:00 on Tuesday!) - Kris Lockyear talking about 12 years of community geophysics in the UK. Did week long fieldschools following the National Parks Service school model - creating capacity across local archaeology groups #icap2025

correction - over 10,000 retractions (!) - our little journal has just 1 of these...(my post missed a k out as I am tired and not proof reading well sorry) #icap2025 #miniretraction

Chris Gaffney @resandmag.bsky.social ending with the strong statement to a round of applause - 'We (the archaeological prospection community) are not the problem here, but we can and will be the solution' #icap2025 #academicpublishingisbroken

The thing we need most at the moment according to Gregory is that people need to step up and conduct the peer reviews when invited, we must act as our own quality control. Chris G making the point that Wiley have had over 10 retractions- reflection of the huge pressure to publish #icap2025

This isn't yet indexed - and so early career folks will be at a disadvantage. Gregory Tsokas, co editor with Eileen pointing out that this is a worldwide problem, and we have to move from quantity to quality in publication, but how to reconcile with national funding bodies etc? #icap2025

Geophysical Archaeology Open Access Publications – GPR for Archaeology

Immo Trinks making a strong point in the discussion about his experience of applying to be an editor, dissatisfaction with Wiley & his ultimate decision to decline the editorial job - Larry Conyers has started an open journal which we may turn to instead gpr-archaeology.com/geophysical-... #icap2025

We are frogs in a boiling pot: open publishing was an attempt to fix it but article processing fees and co-option but the big few killed that dead. Huge conflict of values and interest #icap2025 #publishingisbroken #itsbasicallyracketeering

Eileen - traditional publishing is dying - in last 7 years decreasing support from publishers, push towards special editions which the Editors in Chief have little control over, no support regarding handing over the reins to new editors... problem is across the board: what can we do? #icap2025

Saying what we mean, meaning what we say: Managing miscommunication in archaeological prospection In North America, archaeological prospection has recently undergone a surge in popularity, resulting in higher visibility for both scientific and fringe narratives. This has been partially due to inc....

Next speaker Will Wadsworth has a paper in ArchProsp about exactly how prospection data is particularly vulnerable to fringe narratives and bad actors- onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #icap2025

This took six months, and due to the way they had to push the retraction to 1 error, the retraction might not have addressed the core issues the archaeological community were appalled by, but it was the best way to achieve the full retraction #icap2025 #ethics #publishing #scicoms #pseudoarchaeology

Fascinating to see how difficult it is to actually (even as a the editor of a journal) to get a paper retracted- in the end had to hone in on 1 major error to make progress. The editors had to push hard to insist on a retraction, with both publisher & authors pushing for a softer response. #icap2025

Going into the final thematic session on CRM and social valorisation - Eileen Ernenwein giving a very personal paper about the publication and subsequent retraction of the Gunung Padang paper in Archaeological Prospection in 2023 - not going to comment much as it remains controversial #icap2025

Lievens conclusions about these shallow interactive machine learning approach - and his paper is now out so you can follow up there! doi.org/10.3390/rs17... #icap2025

Complex structures then split into separate features, e.g. looking for linearity to discriminate walls from floors. This results in some need for manual reclassification e.g. between walls and floors - this gets vectorised - then it needs ot be quantitively compared with a manual interp #icap2025

Lieven Verdonck now going through semantic segmentation for GPR data using shallow machine learning - getting probabilistic surfaces of likelihood of belonging to user defined classes, which are then refined using thresholds, and then separated into objects using the #ilastik model #icap2025

(This is the point in #ICAP meetings where I try to sum up the major themes of the meeting. We're hearing from the cultural heritage management and community / heritage out reach side of things later on so I might wait until the break before the AGM to give a verdict for #icap2025)

Agnes - we need to turn expert knowledge into context/topological thick standardised descriptions - e.g. borrowing from geomorphometric languages; we need databases with datasets, we need them annotated and benchmarked and with metadata - YES YES YES ! #icap2025

Ethics also leading the way in Agnes' talk about automated dipole extraction in magnetic datasets... #icap2025

Melda closes with a clarion call for extended conversations about ethics and open science in this arena. She also closed with this delightful final slide #icap2025

Melda has key questions for future work using machine learning in archaeology - the MAIA Cost Action she is part of is hoping to work on these challenges, and they are building open access tools for analysis and training datasets etc the legal challenges are high though as IP is complex #icap2025

In conclusion: #icap2025

Hector - one of the complexities of this is the subsequent management of the very large numbers of sites being identified in these sorts of analysis - need to adapt the detection tools for monitoring as traditional site visit based checks not at all viable #icap2025

WE have just quickly gone over a tool that analyses images in real time, detects postsherds & also characterises their abrasion (+ can also assess the visibility conditions and produce compensated density maps) o__0 #mindblown #Anysufficientlyadvancedtechnologyisindistinguishablefrommagic #icap2025

This of course has implications for machine learning... Also, we are still working on discovery/detection of 'sites' and these tools might be more suited to other questions - e.g. how are these things different? What patterns emerge? #icap2025

Hector making a clear point that the data we collect are a proxy of an archaeological feature, which is in itself a proxy of the research question- need to recognise this implicitly in the way we think about computational analyses- e.g. satellite images = spectra, LiDAR = elevation models #icap2025

2/2 intersection of my interests in information sciences, geophysics and landscape archaeology. The speakers are all also scientists I eagerly follow, and I am especially looking forward to the keynote from Hector Orengo, and for an update on Melda's research following it #icap2025 #informatics

Final day at #ICAP2025 and my posts today are going to be more sparse- sore hands (thanks body, not the time to be angry with me about travelling) and wanting to pay special attention this morning to the session on automated data interpretation and classification as it is right at the 1/2

Switched to my @aocarchaeology.bsky.social hat to present work I did in my job there,l with the Environment Agency on a Bronze Age barrow cemetery in the Nene Washes nr Peterborough- with thanks to AOC, the EA & Peterborough City Council for allowing me to share this developer led survey! #icap2025