Okay, thank you so much, Joe. So, yeah, my name is Rua, welcome everybody, fantastic to see a packed room, a little bit daunting. This is my first word camp, I'm from New Zealand, I'm over here from Dunedin. I don't hate Australia, used to live in Sydney for a while, kind of enjoyed that, Brisbane's really nice. So, I work for automatic, I've been working for automatic for about a year and a half, and I work on WooCommerce.com, so I don't work on WooCommerce the plugin, and I don't work on WordPress, but I do work on a website that is a WordPress website and uses WooCommerce to sell WooCommerce plugins. So, I'm here today because I'm quite excited about Gutenberg, and possibly most of you know this already, but maybe not all of you, so Gutenberg is the tech behind the brand new block editor that's coming out in WordPress 5.0. I'm not going to use the clicker. So, just before I get started on the talk proper, let's do a little show of hands so I can get an idea of where everybody is on their Gutenberg journey.  Okay, thank you for those of you who are. So, now throw your hands up if you are using Gutenberg for posts or pages, not all of them, but just any post or page on a real site. Okay, great, similar number of people. So, the last one, extra for experts.  Okay, this is perfectly pitched. So, this is a warm-up talk to get you excited about building your own custom blocks, among other things. Okay, so what is it that gets me so excited about Gutenberg? It's because you can build a block for anything. So, I really love the idea that WordPress and sites built on WordPress can become more diverse, more interactive and more engaging. So, it's not just about blogs and it's not just about text with media embedded. It's about much more than that. So, Gutenberg or Block Editor is a platform that we can use to build those experiences from richer units. So, we have had richer units of content in WordPress for quite some time. This is a short code, which I'm sure you all recognise. It's a short code for a gallery. So, you can do a lot with short codes right now. But I think with Gutenberg, we can really build on this and make it a much better experience for authors and build some cool new things as well. So, here's what a gallery looks like in Gutenberg. I'm sure you've all seen this already. It's much more WYSIWYG. It's much more live. And so, this talk is kind of centred around that kind of transformation. It's about making really nice interfaces for your data, for your authors, for your sites, that really are close to what you're trying to express. So, if you're building a site right now or if you're working with a client and there's something particular about that application or the market that they're in, think about that as we go through the dry technical details of the talk and hopefully you can find some things that you can use this for. So, Gutenberg, as we all know, is the Block Editor. But it's more than just the Block Editor.  And so, I'm talking about one specific thing in particular today in this talk. So, I'm talking about components. So, before we launch into that, let's talk about what components are. So, I've got this definition out of the React documentation. And so, components let you split your user interface into independent, reusable pieces. And this is the most important part for me. And they let you think about each piece in isolation. So, you can break down your user interface or your software into smaller chunks that you can then trust and rely on to do a particular job. So, what are we actually talking about? Components might be a bit abstract. So, in this component library inside Gutenberg, there are some things that you've seen before. Things like buttons and controls for collecting user input, like text edits, date pickers, things like that. There's also things like menu bars. And you can also have components that are made up of other components to build a more rich unit. So, we're going to look at some examples in a minute of these. Before we do that, I'm just going to do a very, very tiny introduction to React. So, maybe another quick show of hands. Who's heard of React? Who's scared of React? Yeah, I mean, I'm comfortable with React now, but it still scares me. So, this is what React really is at its core. So, this is a JavaScript function and in comes some props, some little bits of data. So, think about this, like, what's the data that your site's all about? So, in this case, our prop is a name and it's Muriel, which I believe is a traditional Australian name. And so, that comes in and then our component spits out some markup and that's high Muriel. So, that's what a React component is. So, hopefully that makes React a little bit more friendly and you'll see this pattern over and over again when you're browsing through the Gutenberg source code or when you're building your block. Okay, so let's start off with a really simple component. This is the button component inside WordPress. So, I'm showing the code on screen here for these things. Don't worry about that. If you like looking at the code and reading what's there, then feel free. All this code is lifted directly out of the Gutenberg project, so it's all there on GitHub and you can go and check it out later. It's just to illustrate what I'm talking about. So, we can see that this button has props, those green things, for different kinds of behaviour and properties that you might want. So, this one here is a small button because it says is small and it's also got some other props to control its behaviour and to show a value. And the label for the button is the text that is in between the opening and closing tag. So, very similar to HTML. Here's a more interesting component. So, this one gives you a lot more out of the box. This is the form token field and so, this is what would be used in a post for selecting tags, but maybe with sites you're building, you can think of other things that you might want to use this for. And it gives you all that behaviour of adding new tags, killing tags, all out of the box in this nice, clean little bit of marker. And here's a much more rich, detailed component. So, this is a media placeholder and this is what you present to an author when you've got a block that needs a piece of media and it's flexible, it can be used in different blocks in different ways. So, this is a media and text block which is reasonably new. It wasn't in 5.0, I don't think. It was soon after. And so, it's got guidance for the author about what to do next and you pass that in as a property. And what's really cool about this and what's really powerful about components is that within this, in a innocuous-looking mark up here is all of the code to handle a file upload, making sure that's the right kind of file and that's all very easy to express what you need. So, we've got here what kind of file types we accept and it's just going to take care of that for us. So, that's a little dive into some components as they're used inside Gutenberg. So, you're probably wondering what can I do with these? Where can I use these components? And there's a couple of answers there.  But you can actually use components from Gutenberg for other things as well. So, the idea is with this component library that you can use it for building experiences in WP admin. So, if you're building a plug-in that has an interface for your site administrators or your authors, that might be nothing to do with content. It might be something else to do with your site. You can use these components to build that as well. So, it's going to be pivotal for WordPress going forward to make the admin experience much more targeted at what people need it to do and be able to focus in people's experience on what they need to be able to do. So, here's an example of that. So, I wasn't personally involved in this but WooCommerce has a brand new sort of child plug-in that's going to be part of course soon called WooCommerce Analytics and it's been built using WordPress components and Gutenberg Tech from the ground up but it's nothing to do with content. It's nothing to do with the block editor. It's just about understanding what's happening with your sales and that's been built using WordPress components. So, that's an example of the kind of fun you can have depending on what your domain is and what you could use this for. So, you can see there an old friend. We've got our form token field is being used there and we can see a bunch of other custom components that team's built specifically for so, let me just switch out to my demo now. Yep. So, so now we're going to switch focus a little bit. That was a bit of a talk about technology and so the real reason I did this talk is that I wanted an excuse to play with this and make something fun for myself. I like music. I like electronic music in particular. I like all music but electronic music is what I'm obsessed with more. So, I thought what if I could build blocks that enabled you to add a soundtrack to a page so that you could have a richer experience when you're learning about, say, music genres or, you know, you might use this for other things as well. So, I'm not sure if this is going to... Okay. So, it's coming out of the computer right here. Can you hear that reasonably? Yep. Okay, good. And you can hear me as well. Good. So, at the top of the page I've got a play button block and then I've got a block that's an audio loop and this one is a very, very seminal classic techno track and then as we scroll down the page it switches over to another example of techno music from a bit more current and if the person's reading around in this page doing different things, it's crossfading between those two as they go. Thanks for that. So, that's the experience that I wanted to build and Gutenberg was the tool that I used to build that. So, I think we'll just go back to the presentation now. So, that's up live if you want to have a play with it. There's a few other pages to play to look at. Okay, so how did I do this? So, I'm going to show you another thing that is really useful if you're getting started with this or if you're quite experienced in this area it's just really useful anyway. So, this is the WordPress Scripts package and so what this gives you is a way to get all the dependencies you need to build on Gutenberg library and to build a custom block and to have one dependency for all that and not have to wrangle all the different versions of things obviously with JavaScript and NPM things can get quite out of date quite quickly it's very hard to stay on top of so this helps you with that and it includes Babble so you can write modern JavaScript which is much more nice to work with, it feels much more close to traditional programming and there's also linting tools to keep your code standardised you'll see here there's a start script which you use when you're developing and it'll watch your files as you edit on them and it'll build as you go and that'll allow you to iterate quickly and have fun building as you go and when you are done there's a build script which will build a production version of your plugin which you can then release out to your customers so yeah, have a look at that it might be a little bit alien right now but if you're going to start down this journey it's a fantastic place to start and there's lots of docs about it on the WordPress.org website so a bit more detail about how I built my thing so I used a placeholder so we were talking about placeholders before so when you first drag out the loop block into the editing area you haven't got any audio in it and so you need to choose some media and so that's what I've used the placeholder block for so I've given a little icon that looks like a record came out of dash icons and then I've given the instructions to the user you need to pick an audio file here again, all these codes on GitHub this is all open source so don't worry about it too much right now if you are interested you can have a good look later or you can contact me and we can discuss so there's a toolbar on each block inside Gutenberg which you've probably seen and so the way you build up that toolbar is that you use components for that as well so in our toolbar we have two buttons ones to hide the block from the front end of the site so that it's just sound and you can't see any evidence of the sound that's that little i button and for that one we're passing properties directly into the toolbar component we've also got a media upload button because it's got a media upload check component around it and that's going to handle all of our media upload or selecting from the WordPress media library so you get to build on all the lovely stuff that's in the platform that we've got in a nice clean way so the other block that I built is this play button box and you can have as many of these on the pages you want allowing the user to start and stop the soundtrack and it's got a very basic setting it's got the tempo and how fast you want the music to play and so that's in the sidebar at the right of the editor and so to do that we use an inspector controls component and then inside that we have a panel body which gives us a little nice place to book controls which can be collapsed away when the user doesn't need to see it anymore and then within that we've got a range control which is a way of setting a number between two values and you can see here we pass in playback tempo attribute from our block metadata and then when the user slides it around that'll get saved back in to the attributes okay so that wraps up the talk quite a rapid pace so there's a bunch of links there definitely come and talk to me if any of this stuff is interesting or confusing to you and of course working for automatic it's wonderful I'd encourage everybody if you're interested in that find out about it, it's a really great place to work and yeah there's the repo for the audio blocks up there on GitHub so thank you very much do we have time for questions? I think we have time for maybe a couple of questions so we are running about 10 minutes behind so we'll try and keep them nice and short and sweet and I'm sure the rua won't mind answering your questions after during the break all day he says so hold him to that so do we have any questions who wants to start us off everyone just really wants their coffee right now come on I know someone's got a betting question can we grab a mic up for this gentleman up here thanks I've built blocks using ACF I'm not experienced with React so any benefit that you get from React from working with React at its core versus using ACF to build in your own blocks that's a pretty good question so I'm not hugely familiar with ACF in fact there's going to be a talk that I'm going to go to later that I'm going to find all about that I guess if that's working for you that's great you know keep doing it there's a couple of benefits that I could see from going with the kind of more direct approach one is that you're kind of upskilling in an area that seems to be taking over the whole world right now so the more you can learn and be comfortable with React that might pay off dividends in other places and as far as keeping your site lean and your code base focused on exactly what you want to deliver then going straight to the platform that's built into WordPress is always going to save bytes on your server parse time compile time and run time JavaScript when you're editing in the block editor the more things you have running the slower that experience is going to be for your authors so that could be a factor but yeah thanks for the question awesome any other questions going once going to us yes we've got a gentleman here please there were a lot of references in your code to things that weren't previously defined where do you find all this stuff yeah so I've taken very tiny snippets of code out so yeah that code all came from the Gutenberg repo on GitHub which is right there so take a photo of a slide if you're curious I will put up a blog post about this at some point and are we making slides available to people I believe so find me I'm Hazari, anywhere on the internet is Hazari that's me or Cartoonbeats.com and we'll show you so all the code is in the Gutenberg project there is much more to it I wanted to present clean things that had missing references and the other code was in the audio blocks repo that's very small and fun to browse it's a little hack prototype and just by the way that demo is up live as well that URL is easy to remember it's camp.Cartoonbeats.com so feel free to have a play around with it or stick it on at the next party you're at awesome big round of applause for Roy thanks for starting us off thank you


So, we're really, really pleased to have one of our ARF associates here, Dr. Mitch Adolin, like that, who is an ARF Research Associate, as it says on the flyer, which is great. And also all associates, I don't know what the title is of this Smithsonian Institute, is it the same thing, Research Associate as well. And he has a PhD from UCLA in Near Eastern Studies and has done work on and off in the greater area for a while. And now he's back working on that project, a project they're getting a really perfect here about today. But in the meantime, we also, you may know, he has helped ARF out especially due to his many years of editing and running presses of archaeological publications among other topists and qualitative analysis of it too. And has done a lot of, you know, tremendous work for the greater archaeological community in the sense of disseminating information out to them also. He's done a great deal of work on that and has given ARF workshops on that. And maybe in another year we'll do that again where there's more people to see if he's going to come and do it. So today he's going to tell us about his current project, which is really quite wonderful and something we should be working on ourselves I think, at least the aspect of resurrecting all the data and getting it out there in the world. And he's, it's a project that has gone on in Afghanistan for some time. We'll hear the details. So we're really, really pleased to have him come and present his current research that he's working on now. The title of it is Surveying Cistan. New Tales about an Old Archaeological Project in Afghanistan. So I'd like to have a very warm welcome for Dr. Hitch. So on the fake news, we can't call it old news. This is a legacy project from the 1970s. People know about legacy projects. They're things that you find in files of data that somebody's files in cabinet and try to turn around and publish it. In this particular case, the people who stuck all those things in those files are still alive. I was a young graduate student when I was probably the first to take place in the 1970s. The PI of William Traveldale is now being co-owned and still alive and kicking. Now our geologist is also helping with it. So it's a legacy project with a twist. Because of the fact that this was a 10-year archaeological project, my discussion here is necessarily very superficial. Just trying to get some of the highlights of it and how we're going to get up to you. There's a lot more to be said, but you don't want to. This is taken until 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Let me start by thanking people who have been involved in this project. It takes a whole village to do an archaeological project, but each and every one of you know. Some of the people who have actually helped me locally in working on shirts, descriptions, and labeling are here and I'm thanking specifically and thank our specifically for allowing the institutional support to be able to make this happen. But let's talk about what this project was. It is an archaeological survey of the region of Cistan. For those of you who are not familiar with Central Asian and Asian archaeology, Cistan is the southwest corner of Afghanistan where the port of Pakistan is in Iran. Running through it is the Helmand River, which is the largest river in Afghanistan, and therefore it is a route between both north and south, which is Central Asia and South Asia, and also between the Near East and Asia. It has been known historically since documented documents on the 6th century BC. Alexander of Great Armies marched through here on his way to India. It is the home of Rustam, who is the hero of the Shama May, the Iranian epic, and also the homeland of the Zoroastrian. So it's known a lot historically. There's been a lot of archaeological work done on the other side of the border in Iran, but very little done in Afghanistan. I'll talk more about that in a minute. The Helmand Cistan Project, in which I was a part, began in 1971 and ran after 1979. It was between the Smithsonian Institution and the Afghan Government Department of Archaeology, which has gone through several name changes over the time. We were given concession for the entire southwest corner of the country to do anything you want in archaeologically mirror. This is back in the 70s or whatever. So we had an area of 40,000 square miles. We had a team of four or five Western scholars coming. We had an Afghan Department of Antiquities represented with us every season. A couple of support people from Kabul, and also we hired local workmen in the villages to help do some digging for us. So, you know, you've seen Facebook where they're down. You know, I put your picture from ten years ago when you joined Facebook in your picture today. Well, here's my version of that. Vigil and Bill Trouse, they all started in 1974. Vigil and Bill Trouse, they all started in 2017. Let me tell you a bit about Bill. He was retired as a curator of anthropology in the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian. He retired in 1996 when he's been out of there for 20 years now. He's a specialist in Central Asia and South Asia and also an East Asian art. He worked at the Freer Gallery before that. He's done all kinds of work on Central Asia, both ancient and contemporary, studying British armies and explorers in Central Asia as well as the archaeology of it. He also, in addition to this work, writing a book on the history of the city of Kandahar, Afghanistan in the 19th century. On the other hand, was a first-year graduate student at the University of Michigan, looking for additional fieldwork, Bill County, and put me into this project for a couple of seasons. I worked for two of the ten seasons. Now I got a job in publishing. I had a hard time explaining to my boss why I needed three months off in my first year at work. So I dropped archaeology until a couple of years ago, 30-plus years later. It was in 79 because it was not possible to do fieldwork after that. Those of you who I'm sure all know, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 79 and a series of wars that have gone on ever since then. Another thing about Sistana though, it is one of the centers of the Opium trade. And so it has always been dangerous to be working in Sistana because the Opium dealers and the Opium smugglers that went across the border said bring things into Iran. We are not the first people to do archaeological work in this region. There was a British Boundary Commission that tried to establish the border between Afghanistan, Iran, and what was then British India. And one of their members wrote a very lengthy monograph about the archaeological remains of Sistana. Sir Oral Stein, who was very well known archaeologist who worked in the United States and Central Asia, worked here as well. There were French scholars in the 30s, German scholars in the 50s, Walter Ferris series and Norman Hammond who were two well known American scholars who've done work there as well, the three projects. And that probably best known was Berkeley, people like George Gales who was a Catholic member here who spent a couple of seasons in this region as well. He decided to move from here to Heraklone when he went out into the field and he was driving his Jeep around and had it shot at several times by other people thinking that he was a writer smuggler or the federal audience could be coming to get the writer smugglers. So he wisely moved to Pakistan and he moved to field work instead. But of all these projects, none of them has been this long term, large scale attempt to create the entire cultural history of the region. No one's been there that long and so what we do is producing is very important to understand what the system is all about. We didn't publish very much a couple of popular articles, a couple of small research pieces and a geology monograph. Largely because Bill had a vision of this book, of the final report being in one very large book that contained everything in it. So while there's pieces of it that were done there was never much publishing out of it and also he always had hopes to be able to return back to Afghanistan and do additional work. So even though this project is 40 plus years old almost nothing has been published out of it. Then I retired from publishing and called Bill up and said, well Bill, it doesn't look like you do the finishing piece I'm helping you try to do it with you and for you. I've been working on this for the past couple of years. I've given a half a dozen talks at different professional conferences. There's one paper in the press right now. We've received a grant from the Levy Foundation to help us get the material published in water several volumes. We plan on archiving our data with the National National Archive and provides the data for a variety of other archives that will be able to integrate the material that we found into the larger picture of the people who do archaeology. So how do you restart a project like this that has been untouched for a couple of decades? Well, the first step was excavating Bill's garage. Field notebooks, photographs, slides, maps, you name it, notes, files. I've gone back to this place maybe 10 times now every time I go through the garage and I find more boxes of things. We're still missing a bunch of photographs and slides. This is somewhere, but we still haven't managed to reach that straddling the excavation yet. Some of the material is located at Smithsonian where he worked. The clients were all there. We've had them scan for us. And in a rush to for the U.S. left Afghanistan in 1979, they called him up and said, we have a bunch of material that you're working on in the U.S. Embassy. What do you want with that? He said, ship it to me in Washington. And so there actually is a collection of materials, that are in Washington, at Smithsonian right now. I've had conversations with the director of the museum of the National Museum in Kabul and we planned to repatriate this material after we finished analyzing it. There was most of the actual material itself was left in Afghanistan with Lashkarga and Kabul. Lashkarga was I've been told that the American buildings they ever blown up by the Russians, worried about what might be inside of them. And so I don't think we'll refine most of that material again. And as you all know, the Kabul Museum was trashed during these wars. There may be some fragments that people might be able to pull out of that, but some might be able to foresee any original material again. So literally all we have are missing photographs. To avoid that possibility of losing that material, the first thing we did was digitize things and there were, we've been working on that for two years now, we probably have something in the neighborhood of 30,000 or 40,000 digital images of various notes and photographs and so on and so forth. So that materials can spread around the variety of cities, so we're not likely ever to lose the material that I've managed to actually get out of the garage. We've had a pot party at my house where we actually there's some of the shirts we've actually drawn photographs and inscribed. Some of the people who did that are looking to say thank you so much for your help on all this. We'll have to have a second pot party soon. One of the nice things that we've managed to run across is that the University of Chicago received contracts from the FNC government to create a national map plotting all the known archeological sites in practically the entire country on that map to help preserve those sites. We managed to get, we gave them all of our data of locational data and they have now provided all of our sites onto their maps which helps us with a great deal because they've been able to produce maps for us and also helped them a great deal because we had, you know, a huge collection of archeological sites that in Afghanistan we could tell them a lot about what they were at before we were working together with the University of Chicago on this project of the godsend for us. But there's still a lot more to do and even though I will end up getting the basic descriptions of all the sites and the time period is done we have lots of little things there that if any of you have graduate students or are graduate students or are interested in looking further at it we collected botanical information from the deserts in Cistan and have those things, I have photographs of those, the originals are in Washington we found a site that had tons of mad impressions on the base we were interested in basketry and weaving, we have dozens of shirts like this that we should require paper at some point from somebody if anybody is interested and there are others like this if anybody is a graduate student you can have these contact me. So with all that as a preface what did we actually find in Cistan working there for 10 years? Well let me tell you a little bit more about the region itself. Cistan was again the southwestern part of the country the Helmont River is the primary feature running through it. The Helmont starts the river in the entire country and it ends in the Humming Lakes which are these very shallow, brackish lakes that are the western border between Afghanistan and Iran because of the fact that it is a river that traverses through mountains and deserts both it has been a route and we know it's probably always been occupied because of the river being there and because of the route between east and west and also between north and south the Helmont Valley itself in Cistan region is fairly narrow somewhere between 1 and 4 kilometers wide not very big and probably cannot accommodate that much population. We probably won't know because of the alluviation created by the river most of the sites that are in the river valley are probably meters and meters down on the surface and of course doing a survey project you'll never find that stuff. So at some point we have some sites in the river valley but most of what we found was there were bluffs overlooking the river or in areas away from the river the Helmont Valley is surrounded by deserts with lovely names like the Dutch Vargo which means Desert of Death the Dutch Juhantum the Desert of Hell or the Regist on the Land of Sand so you can get a sense of what the terrain is like and it really is a pretty rough place to live it's a marginal living land in almost any time except if you're near the river where you have access to water and good soil. In addition to working through the Helmont river we also work in previous riverbeds of the Helmont here in the Rue de Viabat, the Sheila Rue in the Gaudi Zira which we know continued to water in earlier times and we did survey work along those as well as you can see they're dry now we also worked to the east of the Helmont river in this region here called Sarotar most of our work in fact was in Sarotar Sarotar Plain was probably 50 meters by 25 meters by 25 kilometers in size we found most of our archaeological sites there you can see it's not occupied now it's all vast desert covered by sand dunes you can also see archaeological sites popping up all over the place here it's not in places rich with archaeological means here's a plodding of what we found there an enormous number of archaeological means in Sarotar and again because it's abandoned we didn't have to worry about land rights, water trying to get over canals or anything else it was all out there for us to look at the entire region is largely shaped by wind winds come out of the northwest constantly they come at various different speeds in various different ways but it is a very windy environment as you can see it picks up sand and dirt and blows it around making it very uncomfortable sometimes in the summer it's impossible to do fuel work because we've several have tried the wind of 120 days runs between May and September and the wind will often be a 13 force 75 miles an hour or higher and the temperature is in the 110s and 120s so it's not really great archaeological time we went in the fall and even then we got caught in one minute storm that as you can see ripped our camp between the shreds again it was hurricane force minutes but it has shaped the living patterns there I won't be able to do it in detail on that but it also has shaped the archaeological visibility as you can see the entire landscape basically has been sandblasted every year and we have found we've had a couple places where we could determine that there were at least two or three meters of soil that had been sandblasted away based upon what we found and how how far below the current the ancient soil level it was it also doesn't do one of the things for objects you can see these once were all four ridged jars only one that looks like that anymore because it very easily gets eroded away in order to live outside of the area right next to the river canals would be and so dams were built we know this was the case and possibly looking very much like the contemporary dams to raise the water level and institute things out for canals sorry which however we worked and we came out and started here the Reapart area parallel to the river for a while and then went out into the desert and the canals were very long some of them were over 100 kilometers in length which obviously requires an enormous amount of manpower and enormous social organization to be able to pull off these things were not small canals you can see none of the others so you can imagine the labor that was involved in building these but at certain times it was able to be able to occupy Sarotar using this canal irrigation and canals in order to be able to farm that region ours was largely a survey project so we spent a lot of time driving up and down River Valley, walking up and down through Sarotar and just driving over San Luis and up to UZ when we find sites we would usually record them photograph them, draw them if the architecture was drawable and take a collection of shirts to bring back some of the more elaborate sites we actually did formal excavating and drawing up and over time we ended up excavating probably 9 or 10 or 12 sites, you can see that the technique was not a contemporary modern archaeology kind of excavation but again remember this is the 1970s that we're talking about and for digging in Central Asia this was kind of standard property to proceed back to those days we did do a couple of fairly unusual things this was again the beginning of the new archaeology and so we tried a few of these new archaeology things like collecting botanicals that we thought might be useful someday our Afghan representative we interviewed local villagers along the Helmand River to try to get a center of village life to do an ethnography of the Helmand River he wrote for a monogram on that in Pashto we have translated it into English and it will appear as part of our final report our geologist also was very actively involved in trying to understand the landforms climate, hydrology, and so on and so forth so we did things that weren't necessarily old style archaeology although for the most part our project was pretty old style and also we ended up with somewhere between 150 and 200 sites, I don't know how you want to count them as you can see there's a little river valley a lot of the Sarantara area and a few of the western river courses that we also studied although we're not spending a lot of time there there are a lot of sites that were identified by previous researchers some very large visible sites that have been preserved for hundreds and often thousands of years we tended to stay away from those because someone had already documented those we were looking for things that had not previously known or documented so we didn't do these kind of places and ultimately we ended up with was an archaeological chronology it's a bit fuzzy around the edges because again doing survey work there's only so much as you can tell as far as dating we had a few gaps in the archaeological record probably those gaps probably don't exist there probably weren't people living there since it's unlikely that river valley was ever completely abandoned but we aren't able to identify archaeologically what those time periods look like in terms of material culture in order to be able to understand who might have been there I'm going to talk about several of these time periods that held us to the part of the Sania period Iron Age and the Sephard and Ghazna period and the Muhr period we found bronze age materials bronze age is very well known in this area those of you who have studied this know Shawnee South Dog which is a very famous third millennia BC site we found several other smaller sites in the General vicinity we found also a few archaeological sites on the river valley that contained small amounts of bronze age materials not surprising we don't have really that much to add to the discussions of bronze age other than the fact that people did live in the river valley then so I won't dwell on that but we do have things that go back probably to the the third millennium BC in our region and we were the first people there both pair surveys and dales when they surveyed we were surveying this area we were looking specifically for bronze age materials so there's already a fair literature on that if you can add a little bit too but one thing that does puzzle did puzzle both of them and has puzzled people working in Iran Shawnee South Dog, this large site in Iran is abandoned somewhere around 1800 BC there is no evidence of anybody living in Iranian system between then and about 600 BC the place is abandoned no one really knows why our guess is that the river at some point went to the west and at some point the river took its place and headed north instead and we claim that one because of the absence of any living on the western part of the system while at the same time we find in our area an entire culture that is previously unknown archaeologically the early Iron Age culture of the Afghan system we found it first at the site called Kala 169 went and visited it two or three times found a bunch of painted pottery there that looked vaguely bronze age and so went back and done a bunch of trenches at the site in order to be able to try to find out more about it the site itself was built on a popso which is an impact in my platform some mud brick extensions we built these on it and then later overburdened from a thousand years later from the the original stuff here on top of the popso platform and along the side of the popso platform is unknown archaeologically and we were the first to figure out what this stuff is as you can see there's painted pottery it's an unusual style that hasn't been found yet and right correlates to it as we get more surveying in systema and having found this one site we can find other sites that have the same type of material on it so that we believe when we finally add it all up that there really is a whole culture here that dates to this gap somewhere between 800 and 600 BC we'd probably know more like 1200 to 700 based upon what we found the pottery itself is very unusual hard-fired it's very square it's over-fired to grey almost in many cases and has geometric designs that are very distinctive with a lot of lozenges and circles and suns and all geometric most of it is actually very simple lines but this is some of the more elaborate pieces once we've had a sense that there is a culture here we started looking for other sites that like that we found seven other similar sites in Sarotar each of them had identical ceramics to this particular one this particular site called 169 and also had an identical formation of the site there was a platform on the northwest which is the direction wind comes from and then there was a compound beneath it an occupation both on top and next to it the same thing here there's the mound compound down here so in any word there's a close similarity between all these sites both in terms of material culture and in terms of design there's obviously something going on here that's a design and of course you needed all these canals to get there too so somebody was there doing something big during this period of time once we had this culture identified we went back through our older collections and future collections and found that there were sites all along the river valley as well as in Sarotar so we now have over 20 sites that we can identify from this time period again there's nothing similar on the other side of Sistan and on the Iranian side nor have we found anything like it anywhere else how do you date this? well we took a whole bunch of carpet dates from the from our excavations at column 169 everyone looked at sort of the dates that might as well be from DCP and as you can see there's absolutely no consistency the ones that are all the same color were all taken from largely the same place so they should all be the same each color should have the same approximately the same dates and as you can see they vary widely so the carpet dates don't help us very much to narrow it down they range between the 3rd century and the 16th century BC the best number of them actually run somewhere between the 8th and 12th century so that's what we've tried to date a collection from in the absence of any close material cultural parallels we excavated another site called Konakala number 2 this is also Konakala number 1 that's in the river valley not right here because we found materials from a variety of different time periods on the surface and in fact that sort of played out in our excavation we found all of the pre-Islamic levels from mid 1st millennium AD to E Parthian early 1st millennium Hellenistic late BC and sort of mid 1st millennium BC all stratified at this particular site we also found both Bronze Age and our early Iron Age stuff that came up in the collections that we did not find a layer so we have to assume those parts are down as a deeper in the site there are recommended remains from times of the Persian Empire from the 6th to the 4th century BC again we don't have all that much to add to the discussion but in the fact that we have them but we did start finding Hellenistic remains it's found in fact a couple of balanced examples from the time after Alexander the Great was traversed through the Elmons we were put on to by a collector who also worked as a contractor for the U.S. Government working in Afghanistan who hired people to go in to the site and showed us his 4,000 objects we talked to his son trying to get them to repatriate the material without the success yet but I'm still working on that they were all found on this hilltop and we went up to the hilltop and found some of our own materials that also looked like things that would come from the Greek temple but there's no sign of any architecture there except a shrine a recent Islamic holy man and it's not uncommon that people will bring materials to put on these shrines we did find nearby a site called Mokotar looked like remains of a Hellenistic temple and so it was outside our server area so we didn't do a full write up of it but we're pretty sure that the material found in the site caused it to be a king originally from Mokotar there was a second Hellenistic temple farther down the river valley at a place called Sayak the winds were not very kind to Sayak and it basically eroded the site all the way down pretty much to the foundation levels of the buildings but we were able to pull them up together to get a plan you can see how the entire hill was covered with signs right above the valley and in the center was what looks like a Greek temple there's a colony in the front there's a chamber, there's a cellar again we were at foundation level so we couldn't find out very much about it but we were also lucky enough to find the well from the cellar and then decided to excavate the well 15 meters down the water table the poor Afghan guy who sits down here every day I'm glad I wasn't there and to our delight and expectation, once the well stopped being used people would throw a junk into it and so we were able to find all kinds of materials there's figurines like this pieces of architectural fragments that look very Greek and most important of all we found an inscription that probably sat on top of the temple when it was in use of Greek characters, I don't read it it may not be the Greek language probably it's not the Greek language we've sent it to a couple specialists in England to read for us and also you'll note in addition to the big characters there's also graffiti in an Aramaic language Aramaic characters on this and they're reading that as well anyway, that should tell us a lot about the site once we get back from them the next period after the Hellenistic the Parthian period probably the first couple of centuries BCE is probably the time of the Great the largest occupation ever in the system we found more sites dated to the Parthian times than any other time period and to support that the Iranian archaeologists who work on the other side of the border have also been doing surveys we've seen an area here and they've found a huge number of Parthian sites on the Iranian side of the border as well Sarotar to the east was the site of the time canals were fully used we have all kinds of agricultural settlements and buildings we've found a series of jars sets of jars that were sent into the ground there probably were structures associated with them that have been eroded away but the jars themselves because they were sent into the ground they still existed and we don't know what back in those days you could do residue analysis so we don't know whether that was water or grain or some kind of liquid we do have a dozen sites or more that were just the jars that were probably represented agricultural homes interestingly because of the fact this is a cross road we have the Hellenistic Crown we also have Zoroastrian shrines we found three of them in Sarotar in the system the first one being Shnokhala which is located on top of a large mound of volcanic stone a shrine way on the top there you can see it it's directly across the Hellen River from Khoi Khanashin which is the one mountain in this area and therefore the most visible part of the landscape you can see it from anywhere and this site was a series of terraces leading up to the summit each terrace was walled off with a narrow gate leading up to the next one and on the very top where the building is was a charred top those of you not familiar with Iranian archaeology a charred top is a building that actually consists of four corner pillars no walls in between but a dome on top and then a fire structure of some sort to burn some kind of sacred fire in the middle and we found that here on this site so we're pretty sure this is not a traditional fire temple it's some kind of Zoroastrian holy building there are parallels to this, the best known is Kui Hwaja which is on the other side of the border of the Iranian side of the border it also sits on a pile of volcanic stone and also has a series of terraces leading up to their charred top we have on the top there so that the conceptually even though Kui Hwaja is way more elaborate than we have, the conceptually is very much the same in very many ways a second fire temple we call temple 215 we found in the Sarotar area it has again very traditional Zoroastrian architecture there's a central fire room here which we found layers of Ashtarian side of it and Iwan which is an open ended room leading to the outside in front of it an anti chamber and an ambulatory walkway that goes around it all which is very standard architecture for these kinds of structures we have a third one that's much more fragmentary than we found in Sarotar interestingly the walls are very heavily plastered and when we believe after the last clustering some graffiti artists went and carved a giant palace testes and walls on the walls of the temple we assume it was built on rock and in addition to our Zoroastrian and our Greek Hellenistic style culture tribes we also have Buddhist stupas we have three of them one of them we actually excavated on top of this hill you can kind of go higher there's a walkway around it it sits on top of a hill and below that there's a series of caves where the monks probably lived we have there was almost no tier of culture that we could find there so it's hard to date that but again it's very likely that we have Greek, Zoroastrian and Buddhist co-occupation of this same area at the same time what's the country by Islam Zoroastrian becomes the province of a dynasty called the Separates and the Separates existed in the 19th and 10th centuries they were a petty kingdom of warriors who kept fighting with their neighbors and were all about war favorite defense we have written records of who they were and who began who but they Sistan was their base they built this city called Shari Gokula and as it was all about defense as you might see there are 5 different wall systems there are 3 different moats protecting the house the walls are 10 meters high the moats 25 to 40 meters wide and 2 meters deep it's huge and they were obviously very concerned about their defense the city they built inside of it the palace some other structures a mosque, a bazaar the palace is very unusual because the walls aren't square to start with and the walls aren't straight we don't know any parallels in Islamic architecture but as far as we know this site is unique we know this building had 3 stories we found a stairway going down on the lower levels you can also see way up here the floor of the third floor so it's a 3 story palace and the central feature was an audience hall again shaped like a char talk 4 quarter pillars and a dome in the center that was the main public area of the palace dating it was extremely difficult primarily because water techniques were not that good and secondly for a variety of reasons our dating was not very good we had everything from largely a Sasanian pre-Islamic remains underneath the walls of the palace right there but also supporting time things and even later but as we dug deeper we discovered that they hadn't built an original palace here because the deep, the Islamic palace there is a Sasanian palace and below that a Parthenon palace so the original building was probably built somewhere in the first couple of centuries CE rebuilt by the Sasanians in the mid first century and then later rebuilt by the Safarans we worked also around the interior of the inside the circular wall found another public building and that gave us all the Safaric pottery we need to do Islamic pottery you call this mostly Salmanic pottery but it's the same time period from Iran and other places around there and that gave us confidence that the buildings on top as well as the buildings on the terrace date to this 9th and 10th century period I won't talk anything about the mosque but the mosque and the street next to it and any care of ensirai when the Ghaznavids came in Mahmoud of Ghazni who ruled all of that in the 11th century they re-intended this site and added a few things particularly the lower palace here the lower palace is a very sumptuous building the large courtyard 40 wands and rooms on each side and on the other side another courtyard with again, this is something that as far as we know is unique in Islamic architecture we haven't found any parallels to this yet if any of you know something let us know because you'd like to be able to find something that's similar to that but as far as we know there isn't any we do know that this particular building was dated from the time of the Ghaznavids 11th century, 12th century Lashkar-e-Bazar which was one of their palaces was excavated by the French and you can see the ornamentation these large keyhole arches the use of bricks and decoration and we have an identical thing here and the plan is again the same large courtyard wands small courtyard the site was destroyed historically by Genghis Khan in 1222 we actually found coin ports which the last 8 years coincidentally 1222 luckily those things work together but we do have these coin ports the coins are among our missing things the Numismatics Department of the Smithsonian never returned and now they claim they don't have it so at some point we may have to go over to debate the last occupation of Shari-Govila and the last large occupation of the region generally was during Timurid times this is the 14th and 15th century under time after Tamerlein they did not do a lot with the palaces so nicely sitting there but they did build themselves a lot of nice homes and they found around there and drew canals into them there was some use of the bath house that was built in the Ghazni mid-times and to our surprise and horror on top of the pile of ash from the heating element we found 8 skulls decapitated each of them drilled through the forehead through the sharp object the head of the skeleton were found several hundred meters away buried in a wall known sites in throughout the area from Timurid times we documented some of them right by the river as you can see but one of the things that was really unique was that when the canal system in Sarotar was built in and stopped being used people locked their doors and walked away and left their buildings intact it's also remote enough that there's not been a lot of looting and so there's a huge number of buildings that are almost complete sitting there across this entire region and our claim is that this is probably the most complete collection of pristine 15th century architecture you can find anywhere in the world it hasn't been touched since then here's one of the aerial photos of one of the villages called the house but you can see there's two dozen houses there some of them threw still three stories high sitting there untouched and they haven't been touched very much since the 15th century we excavated in one set of these houses I think I can tell myself and in the material we found all kinds of organic materials like cloth bone rope and so on and so forth the landscape itself is almost untouched you can see right here you can see a canal that was used in the 15th century where they were doing agriculture you can see the pipe piping bringing water to the house all that stuff just seemed to fly on the surface it would be lovely to go back possibly could and really do a full study of that 15th century community because it's enormous and it's literally untouched mausoleum that still stands almost complete a dump coat where they raise dumps anyway that was the last major occupation of the area there have been people living there constantly since then this one site called Yamedra is a modern shrine as you can see there's a giant mound of goat horns outside that came from offerings we did find a 10th century 11th century building that is destroyed so there's lots there are obviously people still living there and still being used some of these buildings have been reused from earlier times there's a lot to be done and we only were able to scratch the surface after a decade unfortunately no one is going to be able to go back any time soon so it's what we have discovered what we have finally reported on after 40 years delay is probably going to be the only thing that people will know about system for a long time to come but hopefully it has some of the things that will get better and some of you won't I'd go back there because the archeological treasures are just waiting to be explored thank you I'm sure you're going to take it back thank you for the wonderful talk actually I have a lot of questions but I want to prioritize them I saw a lot of beach aerial photos and I know that you also used the pre-classified images so I want to know if there was any kind of airplane that talked about the time there was a USAID project in this region and in the 1950s they did aerial photography of the whole area I don't think I've shown any of those but we do have photographs from the 1950s what I showed here were all from satellite images from the last couple of decades so the sand dunes, everything there were a lot of high elevations and community images all from the top of the sand dunes top of the sand dunes again some of these buildings are three stories high still obviously and also the cliffs above the we did not have a plane there were no drones back in those days and we didn't have airplanes no, there was probably a shutdown with some other things so with the radiocarbon chronology so why do you think there's issues with that yourself thinking about is it context is it what do you think is the issue there I had some people tell me most of it was done in the Smithsonian lab because that's where they'll work and I had to sort of say but there should not have been that level of difference are you going to try to re-date is actually like the botanical well the botanical stuff was not found within any sects we don't have and we do have some carbon samples but not from this particular time period later sects but not from this particular time period unfortunately those left in Afghanistan and I don't know one sample for example that we had half of the Smithsonian sent the other half to a different lab, beta lab and they came back with a 600 years difference so you know it's like the most recent thing about DNA where someone did a test and they found all the DNAs actually in art and science but there's the art part as well I wish it would have been lovely if we had consistent dates but since 8% of the range from this time period, 7th century somewhere in that range is likely time period I was wondering what your best guess for fuel that these people used to use I know there's some shrubs in the valleys but when they're also valley along the canal what do you think they used to cook your meals with I've never actually thought about that question they obviously had animals so dumb would be very likely when we were excavating these 15th century houses the last 3 meters was all done which helped preserve all of them but you used it as fuel what do you think that was probably the main fuel for that I would assume so and I'd assume also when the area was out occupied me that I should have planted trees they would have trees as well the river valley is obviously not a problem trees, plants grow but Elm, Sartor, for example that's useful now never got to use it there wasn't much if we say the 8 skulls that you find would you find any human remains from bronze or iron yes we found in one of these mountain sites with the compounds around it we found a couple of burials that had been exposed by the wind they were very similar to burials from Central Asia from the 10th century in Soviet we do have stuff like that but again we didn't take them where they're left on the ground so they're they're not available, I can tell you photographs of what we do have but nothing built for the masses from what you were saying a lot of pictures that looked like the buildings were really eroded by the wind and by sand I couldn't tell from the pictures what building material people were using but either packed mud oxen, mud brick, or baked brick later periods we used baked brick but in earlier stages it was all mud brick and of course one of the criteria for getting these things is sizes of the mud bricks because those changed over different times I didn't get into that at all but we do have in addition to having ceramic chronology we also have mud brick chronology so we really want the new styles in the Islamic architecture but actually it's kind of an Islamic architecture that they mix some of the features that we launched in short with some of the local designs actually at the local style of architecture and then they usually come with something different it's kind of local internalization of the Islamic art and the country is completely regional so under one time period we see multiple designs so my question is did you find some features that were actually present in the region before and then it was mixed with this architecture or is it completely I don't know how to answer that I'm still trying to find parallels to some of these things I've been looking through Islamic art particularly for the wavy line and certain T-walls haven't found any the next steps that we see for any Sasanian buildings that are built like that again people I've asked haven't don't know of them but that doesn't really exist but it's the Alhambra in Spain and it post-states this thing by four or five hundred years so who knows there might in fact be other buildings like that but we haven't uncovered anything in our description which is why I'm hoping that some of you who are experts on it yourself if you've ever seen something let me know because that would be great I hope there are canals and dams from the ethnography to the tribal like what we have south of Iraq kind of adding material like said in previous construction of these basically temporary dams that have to be renewed well as you can see these particular dams weren't even built as permanent structures they were stones inside of woven baskets and rigged to raise them I don't know there are written documents from the early 20th century that talk about built dams along the Helmholt and along the canals from the Helmholt so I there's obviously a variety of different stones that were used we don't really know what it looked like in the Bronze Age or the Partian period or the Governor period we don't really know the wars I do document that's what they were were they tribal or were they tribal in the sense of different tribes I don't really answer that question I haven't looked at that part of the photograph so I'll go back that's me anybody else can I stand for a while I'm in his first one so thank you


I want you to step away from the fear that your time is running out because that mentality creates resistance in us and that resistance creates its own anxiety and stress and that resistance comes from the belief that all our time is the same and externally that's true, we all have 24 hours in a day but internally it's not the timing of your life internally is completely unique to you it doesn't matter whether someone is in a similar sphere of pursuit to you and by this time you think you should be much further on like they are your life is subject to a timing no one knows about and you need to that allows you to rest into the rhythm of the timing of your own journey which allows you to sometimes experience a lifetime's joy in one single moment when you stop chasing something you think that should look like based on external timing rest and relax into the timing of your life internally rather than be a slave to the tyranny of external time that says by now you should be this that or the other you shouldn't, you're doing fine settle down into the rhythm of your timing of your own life it's all good, cheers