Today's blog is brought to you by...

...the north wall of the Swann House! The rainy fall weather has kept us inside the office, meaning that we are all diligently working on site reports and mapping. One of my tasks today was continuing to digitize our maps of the Swann House foundation. Pete did a quick drawing a week or so ago, but since then we have been back out in the field with our pencils and folding rules to carefully map in each stone and brick. While tracing these hand-drawn maps in AutoCAD does not sound especially difficult, it becomes more time-consuming than one would expect! To start, we scan in the drawing(s) we intend to digitize. The drawing below is the section of the north wall farthest to the west.

This scanned document is then referenced into AutoCAD, scaled, and traced. After the large stones are copied we go back through and add the patches of mortar (the darker hatched areas). The drawing below is the completed north wall that Anne has been working on over the past week. Please click on both of these images to get a better idea of what these maps look like (Note: you will be unable to so this in Microsoft Internet Explorer but should work fine in Mozilla). To the left you can see the digitized version of the drawing above, which has now had the other sections of the north wall added onto it. Once each of the four walls is completed, we will merge them together and have a detailed drawing of the foundation. This final masterpiece will be used primarily for publication purposes, though it also gives us a clear reference for the site now that we have left the field for the season.

Kelley