Daniel M. Russell's Blog, page 7

SearchResearch Challenge (9/25/24): How literate are people wrt road signs?

I've wondered for a while... 

... to what extent people actually understand common signs and symbols they see every day.  You probably understand all of the symbols in the above image, but based on some of the stellar driving skills I see, it's pretty clear that not everyone shares that skill.  What's the difference between the first symbol in row 2 vs. the third symbol in row 2. Do you know?  

That brings up an interesting SearchResearch Challenge for the week.  How literate are we? The goal of a roadside symbol is to be rapidly understood--you see it / you understand it.  It's supposed to be automatic.  But... 

1.  How many of the most common roadside symbols DO people understand?   

Don't just give me your estimate but find where this has actually been studied, and what the results are.  Are you surprised by what you found?  Do you think the study (studies) are valid and sound?  

Does this make you feel better or worse about your fellow drivers? 

As always, tell us HOW you found your results. 

And... 

Keep Searching! 

The basis of reading literacy is glyph recognition. Just sayin'... 

Answer: What is the oldest city in the Americas?

 Simple questions are

sometimes harder... 

Mythical ancient city by Imagen
... than you'd expect.   

This Challenge is like that.  It's a very straight-forward question that might not have the simplest answer.  It's up to you to figure this out! 

1.  What is the oldest city in the Americas? 

You'd think that just asking a search engine or an LLM would give you the answer and you'd be done.  Right?  

Well... if there's any deep lesson from SearchResearch, it's that things are never as simple as you'd expect... there's always something deeper and more interesting behind the question.  

Every question, even something as straight-forward as this, needs a bit of definition help.  The answer--no surprise--is going to depend on how you define "city" and how you define "oldest."  

First things first: How do we define a city?  Is it just population or "level of sophistication" or some combination?  

By the dictionary definition, a city is just "a large number of people who live fairly close together."  True, that, but not particularly precise.  What's "large" and "close together"?  

Remember that in the year 0, Rome was around 1 million people in size, while London was only around 1.4 sq km (0.5 sq mi) and home to less than 5,000 people.  Of course, by the year 537 AD, Rome's population had fallen to around 30,000 souls, while London had risen to around the same number.  

Populations come and go--cities are built, grow, prosper, decline, and sometimes lose everyone becoming less than a hamlet.  

So we have a couple of definitional questions to answer before we get to the key Challenge. 

a. how many people make up a city? 

b. how large an area does a city have to be?  (Or does population density make a city?) 

c. does the length of time a city is occupied make a difference in our question?  

I mention all of these variables because in order to answer the question, we need to pick some values.  (In some sense, it doesn't really matter which values you pick, as long as most people will agree that "this is a city at this time.")  When Rome fell to 30,000 people, was it still a city?  I'd say so, partly because of history, but also because they were fairly densely packed together.  

So, for our purposes here, a city is an assembly of more than 2000 people living in a small area that supports commercial activity, with some kind of government or ceremonial / religious functions.  (We'll ignore continuity for the moment.  If the city lasted for more than 5 years, it is--or was--a city for our discussion.)  

Once you get beyond definitions, you might think you could just ask all of the ChatBot LLMs and Search Engines this question, "What is the oldest city in the Americas?"  

When you do that, this is what you get:  

  

The answers vary based on differing assumptions that each system makes.  

Bing, for example, only shows St. Augustine, FL... but the first organic result points to the Wikipedia article on "List of cities in the Americas by year of foundation" (we'll look at that in a minute).  

Some of the systems expose their assumptions.  Gemini's reply includes the supposition for each: 

"If you consider the oldest continuously inhabited city founded by Europeans, it's Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, established in 1496.    If you're looking for the oldest continuously inhabited city in North America founded by Europeans, that would be St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565. However, if you're talking about the oldest city in the Americas overall, the answer is Caral, Peru. It's an archaeological site dating back to around 3500 BCE, making it one of the oldest cities in the world."

That's a good response, but it does NOT expose any of the other cities that might qualify.  (And is pretty North American biased as well since it lists Euro-towns before the older places in Peru, but I digress.)  

If you just look at the cities listed here and collect their founding dates (as given by the search/AI systems), you'll have this:

THIS is why doing a comparison table is a great idea--you can see the different options and the different assumptions that were made.  With this table we can look at each of these claims one at a time.  Let's do a little digging for each of these claims.  

Tlapacoya is claimed by Perplexity to date to 7500 BCE.  That's quite a claim.  By doing a bit of Google searching, it's clearly a city by 1500 BCE, but there are some artifacts going waaay back, including some rather controversial ones dated to 25,000 BCE.  (They're so controversial that we're going to ignore them here.) But where did the 7500 BCE claim come from? 

When I pushed Perplexity on this [why did you say that Tlapacoya dates to 7500 BCE] it rapidly backpedaled and claimed--falsely--that "I did not mention that date."  Harrumph.  Yes you did.  I have the screencapture to prove it.  Sigh. So this seems bogus... The actual founding date of Tlapacoya seems to be 1500 BCE.  

Footnote:  I figured out where the claim of 7500 BCE for the start of Tlapacoya comes from... it was scraped from the Wikipedia article, List of Cities in the Americas without careful verification.  Oops!  There is an error on the internet... Perplexity just forgot what it was trained on.  

Aspero was pretty clearly a city (with major buildings, large temples, and agricultural fields) by 3000 BCE.  It was part of the Caral-Supe civilization which goes back even farther. (The Caral-Supe culture seems to date to 5000 BCE, but cities started later and can be reliably dated to ca. 3700 BCE.)  
Huaricanga was also connected with the Caral-Supe culture and dates to 3500 BCE.  There are more major buildings and temples and possibly a connection to Aspero.  

Caral seems to have had several thousand inhabitants starting around 2600 BCE, centrally located to all of the Carl-Supe sites.

HOWEVER... while reading about Caral, I stumbled across a mention of site that was possibly older--a place called Bandurria.  Curious about this place (which wasn't mentioned by any search engine or LLM), I did a bit of searching and found dates for Bandurria that are around 3000 BCE--older than Caral, but newer than Huaricanga. (See Paleodiet in Late Preceramic Peru: Preliminary Isotopic Data From Bandurria)

Odd, isn't it?  A major city that is contender for oldest city in the Americas, and it doesn't show up in any of the search/LLMs.  

There are a couple other sites that are quite old e.g., Puerto Hormiga in Columbia, or Celilo Falls (aka Wyam) in Washington state--but both of these seem to be ephemeral villages or trading locations--they have long histories as temporary settlements, but never quite made it to city status.  

Bottom line:  The "oldest city in the Americas" tag has to go to Aspero (3710 BCE), with Huaricanga (3500 BCE) and Bandurria (3000 BCE) close behind. All of these cities had more than 2,000 inhabitants, lasted for many years, and were centers of commerce and religion.  

And our new table has moved Tlapacoya to the fifth position, and added Badurria into position three.

SearchResearch Lessons

1. Compare and contrast different sources.  You know, we've talked about "second sourcing" your results. In this case, I compared eight different systems (search engines + LLM chatbots).  As you can see in the table above, the answers are VERY different from each other.  In some cases, the results are just plain wrong.  (Interestingly, not because they're hallucinating, but because they trained on data that was incorrect, which then surfaced in their outputs.)  

2. Building a comparison table is handy. Not just because you can then use the table to work through the different results, but also so you can see the huge variety of results.  When the "answers" are this different from each other, you have to be fairly skeptical... which we found was the right thing to be.  

3. Remember that search results might be incomplete!  I found Bandurria because I noticed the unusual name when scanning the results.  Checking into it, I found the 3rd oldest city in the Americas... and a result that NONE of the systems surfaced!  

4. When doing search comparisons like this, make your definitions clear so people will know what you're comparing. 

Keep searching!  

SearchResearch Challenge (9/11/24): What is the oldest city in the Americas?

 Simple questions are
sometimes harder... 

Mythical ancient city by Imagen
... than you'd expect.  We've seen this multiple times in our SRS explorations.  Simple question can lead to fascinating side-excursions into topics that you didn't expect.  

Today's Challenge is like that.  It's a very straight-forward question that might not have the simplest answer.  It's up to you to figure this out! 

1.  What is the oldest city in the Americas? 

Easy, right?  

When you find the answer BE SURE to tell us what you did to find it AND why you believe this is the oldest city in the Americas.  

There's an interesting reason I'm posing the Challenge in this way.  I hope you'll also find out why I'm bothering to ask what seems to be so simple, and so obvious.  

Keep searching!  

Answer: How can you find search phrases beyond your own brain's power to imagine?

 Expanding your thoughts... 

The "Walkie Talkie" building in central London has a giant unanticipated consequence. At certain times of day, the windows reflect the sun's rays to a point creating a hot spot that can damage cars unlucky enough to be parked at the focus.
  ... is a key step for doing SearchResearch research.

1. What can a researcher do to find other words and phrases that would help in doing online searching for such a topic?  Let's consider my topic--unanticipated consequences--how can we find other helpful search terms and phrases to seek out and understand this topic?  Ideas?  

Note that what we're looking for are other ways to say "unanticipated consequences." While getting synonyms for each of these two words isn't a bad idea (unanticipated = unexpected, surprise, etc. while consequences = effects, results, etc.), you'll miss a bunch of equivalent phrases or terms. From my own reading in the area I knew that phrases like "cobra effect" or "perverse outcomes" were equivalent, but my brain doesn't answer questions like "tell me all of the other terms and phrases" for this idea.

You could do the obvious synonym search with a search engine.

The Challenge this week was to imagine that you're doing research on a topic that's big, complicated, and difficult to render in just a few words.  How do you start to search for such a beast? How do you expand your mind (and search behavior) to other phrases, terms, and ideas? That is, you could do this (note that you need to use double quotes, or you'll get synonyms for "unexpected"):

It's interesting that Google is giving me synonyms for "unforeseen consequences."  I guess that's the same as "unanticipated consequences," but it's a bit odd.  

If I try Bing, I get this, which isn't quite as useful: 

EXCEPT that in the lower right corner, there's a contribution from CoPilot (i.e., ChatGPT4) suggesting that I try "boomerang effect," "collateral damage," or "Dutch disease." (I hadn't heard of Dutch disease before, so that was a new one to me--it means an apparent causal relationship between the increase in the development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture).)  

But I thought this might be a great chance to try out LLMs as a way to get suggestions about equivalent phrases--that is, after all, what they're really good at doing.  

So I prompted each of the top 5 LLMs for [give me a list of the top ten terms or words that mean the same thing as "unanticipated consequences"].  Here's the spreadsheet with the results, which looks like this: 

You can see a pretty good suite of options here, including several that I hadn't thought about ("unforeseeable repurcussion" or "collateral impacts").  

But we had a great set of suggestions from SRS Regular Readers: 

remmij: 

type in "unintended" and let the suggestions populate.

Here's what I get when I follow remmij's strategy.  It's not a bad way to start.  

From Arthur Weiss:  

Now we can use ChatGPT and similar tools. So I put in this prompt: [I'm trying to find books on the topic of "unanticipated consequences". What synonyms should i use in searching for this topic?] 

(Arthur generates the same list I show above.)  

You can combine these with broader concepts such as "policy," "technology," "social change," "economics," or "decision-making" to refine your search further.

I thought it odd that "black swan" wasn't listed so I asked again. (It's useful to have some ideas to back up what the AI gives you).

"Black Swan" is indeed a relevant term when exploring the topic of unanticipated consequences, especially in the context of rare, high-impact events that are difficult to predict. Here are some additional related terms that might be useful:  Black Swan events, Chaos theory, Butterfly effect, Emergent phenomena, Systemic risk, Tipping points, Complexity theory, Cascading failures, Disruptive events, Unknown unknowns, Contingency theory, Rare events, Outliers, Wild cards (used in futures studies), High-impact low-probability (HILP) events

UC Librarian Donald Barclay wrote:  

My go-to for this is to turn to the experts and try to figure out what language they use. In the case of unanticipated consequences, I might search the term in PsycInfo ($) to see if psychology has anything to say on the topic. I might also search the phrase in Social Science Abstracts ($) and/or in an engineering database like Compendex’s “Engineering Village.” ($)  If I find that experts in a field use different, possibly more precise, language to describe what I’m researching, I can then search those terms. An obvious example is that non-experts commonly drop the phrase “split personality” to describe a certain kind of mental illness. Psychologists, on the other hand, use phrases like “disassociative identity disorder” to more accurately describe the phenomenon commonly, but incorrectly, known as “split personality.” By searching the term used by the experts, I’m more likely to encounter information created by experts and less likely to encounter information created by someone who has watched too many episodes of Dr. Phil.

Searching “unintended consequences” in PsycInfo got 340 hits, so I will need to refine that search to make it useful. It does happen that, as an unintended consequence, the first hit in PsycInfo told me about a book I do not know but which seems promising, Good Intentions: Max Weber and the Paradox of Unintended Consequences. Looking at the full record for that first hit, I was treated to some PsycInfo subject terms that might lead me in fruitful directions if I combine them with “unintended consequences.” These are: Choice Behavior (major); Intention (major); Social Processes (major); Analysis; Consequence

Pro tip: When you find a promising article in a database, always look at the subject terms that have been assigned to it.

Krossbow:  

Suggested using PowerThesaurus to find wide-ranging synonyms.   (Dan: This is a great tool that I'd totally forgotten about!)   

 

Here's what it gave me:  unintended consequences, unforeseen consequences, unforeseen effects, their indiscriminate effects, uncontrolled effects, accidental consequences, accidental effects, accidental results, inadvertent consequences, inadvertent effects, incidental effects, unanticipated effects, unanticipated outcomes, unanticipated results, undesirable effects, undesirable outcomes, undesirable reactions, undesirable results, undesired effects, undesired outcomes, undesired reactions, undesired results.  

RB: 

Built Wiki-Guided Google Search (a kind of front end to do effective Google searches over the Wikipedia). That site contains: Wiki-Guided Google Search, which searches on Wikipedia articles to find concepts related to the ones you're searching. When RB tried searching for "unintended consequences," he got query word recommendations which were both specific (North American Free Trade Agreement, Eliza Armstrong case) and conceptual (Perverse incentive, Structural functionalism).
The second tool on that site is Clumpy Bounce Topic Search. It determines what Wikipedia categories a relevant page belongs to, determines the most popular pages in that category, and makes the ten most popular pages available. This time when RB searched for unintended consequences, he discovered the category "Consequentialism" and generated a search containing the terms unintended consequences, "Consequentialism", and "Experience machine", which dropped him deep in to the wilds of philosophy search results.

2. Same question, except this time I want to search for books on the topic of unanticipated consequences.  (Yes, I know I can go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, AbeBooks, Google Books, or the Internet Archive.)  What's the best way to find the top 10 books on the topic? 

Unsurprisingly, many of the same tricks that worked above also work here.

When I did the cross-comparision of LLMs suggestions for books, I found this:

which was a pretty decent selection.

Donald Barclay wrote:

As for the books part of your question, you can always resort to not just looking at reviews, but considering where a book has been reviewed to get some idea of how it is regarded. Has the book been reviewed in important journals for the field it covers? Has it been reviewed in outlets like the NY Review of Books, the NY Times, the Times, etc.? On the other hand, metrics like “New York Times bestseller” are worthless because it’s beyond simple for publishers to manipulate bestseller lists. You can also look up a book title in a source such as Google Scholar to see how many times it has been cited. A lot of citations is not necessarily an endorsement, but at least it shows you how much attention has been paid to the book. Google Scholar will also direct you to book reviews that might not turn up in Amazon.  

remmij also suggested going to YouTube and searching there for our topic. I've done this before, and I'm glad remmij brought this up. The results are surprisingly rich and worth reading:

SearchResearch Lessons

There are so many here... but here's a quick summary:

1. Try synonym search. Seems obvious, but you'll find a few great ideas.

2. Try using a thesaurus. Krossbow recommends PowerThesaurus, and I see why.

3. Use LLMs and ask for new synonymous phrases. It works surprisingly well, especially if you compare and contrast different LLMs. (Check out my spreadsheet.) This is an especially good use for LLMs in SearchResearch tasks.

4. Check out Wiki-Guided Google Search as another way to look at Wikipedia.  

5. Don't forget about searching on YouTube. There's more there than you might expect.    

Keep searching. 

SearchResearch Challenge (8/28/24): How can you find search phrases beyond your own brain's power to imagine?

 A real challenge... 

The "Walkie Talkie" building in central London has a giant unanticipated consequence. At certain times of day, the windows reflect the sun's rays to a point creating a hot spot that can damage cars unlucky enough to be parked at the focus.
  ... for doing online research (what we call SRS) is figuring out what to use for the search terms and phrases.

For most people and for most research questions, figuring out what search terms to use is not a huge problem--in truth, people mostly look up fairly simple things.  (What's the phone number of my local pharmacy?  When is the swimming pool open?  Is there a grocery store near me?)  The vast majority of online searches are like that--straightforward requests for information.  

But then every so often you land in a really difficult research swamp, and it's tough to figure out how other people would write about the very concepts you're interested in learning about. 

As you no doubt know by now, I'm working on a new book about Unanticipated Consequences (see my earlier post about this).  And even though I'm a full couple of years into the project, I find myself STILL trying to figure out how to find books, articles, web pages, podcasts, news stories (etc.) on the topic. 

That's why today's SRS Challenge is all about how to deal with this kind of problem.  

Suppose you're doing research on a topic that's big, complicated, and difficult to render in just a few words.  How do you start to search for such a beast? More particularly: 

1. What can a researcher do to find other words and phrases that would help in doing online searching for such a topic?  Let's consider my topic--unanticipated consequences--how can we find other helpful search terms and phrases to seek out and understand this topic?  Ideas?  

2. Same question, except this time I want to search for books on the topic of unanticipated consequences.  (Yes, I know I can go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, AbeBooks, Google Books, or the Internet Archive.)  What's the best way to find the top 10 books on the topic? 

Note that we want to learn HOW you'd find such search terms or books.  What process did you follow to come up with search terms that work for your last big, complex, and tricky search?  

Tell us in the comments! 

Keep searching. 

Answer: Finding the earliest aerial photo in your area?

 Photos from the heavens... 

Early aerial photo by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, aka Nadar, from a hot air balloon.
Near Montmartre, Paris, 1866. P/C Wikimedia.
 In my searches this week I found, as Howard Carter said when peering into Tut's tomb for the first time, "... I see marvelous things," including this shot of the pyramids at Giza, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on November 21, 1904.  
Giza Pyramid complex. Eduard Spelterini, 1904.  Wikimedia.  

This is a great example of kinds of EARLY pix were were seeking.  Recall that your Challenge this week was to... 
1. What's the best way to find the earliest possible aerial photos taken of some area?  As we work on this, tell us how you found the earliest aerial images of the place where you live (Vancouver Island, Mexico City, Portugal, Rio de Janeiro, etc.)  
It's one thing to find an image... but more importantly: What lessons should we learn about finding aerial photos?  IS there a general method for finding historic aerial imagery?  Or does every place have it's own special and particular story?  
Once again, I spent way too much time on this.  (There's something about archival imagery that just grabs my imagination and doesn't let go.)  

A little background: The first aerial photograph is widely considered to be one taken in 1858 by French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, also known as "Nadar". Nadar took the photo from a tethered hot-air balloon 80 meters above the French village of Petit-Becetre, took eight separate images on a glass plate negative. Unfortunately, his original photographs are long gone, so the earliest surviving aerial photograph was taken by James Wallace Black in Boston, 1860. He caught a ride in Samuel Archer King's hot-air balloon, the "Queen of the Air" while it was tethered at Boston Common. 

 

I bring this up because it was really hard to get decent aerial photos before 1900.  There were some photos taken from kites, blimps, and even pigeons, but not many, and mostly made for specific purposes. 

 Julius Neubronner, Die Brieftaube als Photograph, in: Die Umschau, JG 12, Nr 41, 1920.  Link.

For even more fun background information, see the Wikipedia article on Aerial Photography.  Aerial images made in these very early days are widely available and often spectacular, but they're not collected anywhere in particular--it's just sort of hodge-podge. Search for your location / subject + aerial photography (maybe add in "kite" or "pigeon" or "balloon" into the search). But don't spend a lot of time on this--the number of images is small.

 

It wasn’t until the First World War that aerial photography took off (so to speak), with commercial photography services springing up.  The best known in the US was Fairchild Aerial Surveys. 

 

Meanwhile in the UK the big post-war aerial photo service was Aerofilms.  (It’s changed hands a few times—the images are available at National Collection of Aerial Photography).   

You can sometimes find the earliest images of a location by searching for a location + kite. When you do this for San Francisco, you'll end up finding the images immediately after the 1906 earthquake as seen from a kite flying over the east side of San Francisco. It's worth clicking on this image as it's pretty high res. (As a local, I can recognize many of the streets even now, 118 years later.)

Kite photo by George Lawrence of San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906. P/C Wikimedia

 

I bring this all up because... knowing the history of aerial photography is important in finding the images.  Most aerial images I’ve been able to find are in collections at libraries, archives, and museum.  And most often, they’re organized by location AND by the company or organization that collected the image. 

 

As my Maps Librarian friend Zoe wrote: “Aerial photography is sometimes publicly available, sometimes privately held or in copyright restriction. It can be indexed or preserved at the municipal, county, state level as well as other jurisdictions, as well as by land management agency in the case of state, federal, and tribal lands.” 

That caution of "sometimes" available is really true. Many collections require money, sometimes a LOT of money to access their pics.

With all that as warning, what CAN you do to find older aerial images?

To do a good search for OLDER aerial imagery, you’ll have to figure out WHERE you’ll want to look, WHEN you want to look, what ORGANIZATION holds the images, and the NAME of the outfit that created (or collected) the images. 

 

For instance, at Airphotos you’ll find the Benjamin and Gladys Thomas Air Photo Archives at the UCLA Department of Geography.  This includes images from the Spence Collection and the Fairchild Collections.  The Spence Collection is from Spence Air Photos, Inc. – All oblique low altitude black and white aerial photographs taken between the years 1918-1971.  The Fairchild photos are all from Southern California taken between 1927 and 1964.  The collection is huge, but most of it requires that you pay $80/hour if you ask them to do the research, or $40/hour if you visit in person. The biggest problem is that they don't really have overview images, so you can't really see what you're going to get. Great collection, but not exactly handy.

 

There’s also the Hatfield Aerial Surveys, available through the Online Archive of California (and the Stanford Archives - and a guide to searching the Stanford Archives). They're mostly aerial photographs of the Stanford University campus and Palo Alto. They're useful to me, but probably not to anyone outside of the 94304 Zip Code.

The point here is that you should try to search in an area, discover what collections exist AND who made them, then search for that collection by name.

For example, to find archival aerial photos of Rochester, NY (where I went to graduate school), I searched for:

[ Rochester NY aerial photograph ]

which led me to learn about the USA School of Aerial Photography, now collected at the Museum of Flight Digital Collections. Once there, I could use the search tool on their website [Rochester aerial photograph] and find a nice set of images. The same trick will probably work for your location.

Sample of the Museum of Flight Digital Collections

Point is, every place has their own set of collections.  You have to find the collection first, then dig in through their interfaces to find what you seek. 
In addition....  places that have some archival aerial images probably have some that are NOT part of their collection, but which are just scattered around and used kind of randomly.  
For instance, at Stanford, you can search on the Stanford.edu site for "aerial photographs" and discover the Stanford Atlas, which just happens to have a set of aerial images, many of which are not part of the Hatfield Survey. 
The deeper lesson here is that you need to find a plausible place that might collection archival photos (e.g., a local history museum, a university, a city library, a local archive) and then spend some time searching through their resources.  
Curious about the history of San Antonio, TX, I looked for their city website (santanio.gov), then did a site: search on Images.Google.com... and then filtered by color to black-and-white.  (I don't bother with filtering by dates because many photo dates are the date-of-scanning or date-of-upload.  Dang it.)  
Here's what that looks like-- [ site:sanantonio.gov aerial ]


Of course, if you search for a library, museum, or archive in San Antonio, you can quickly find UTSA Libraries Special Collections, which has a number of lovely archival aerial images that you can filter by date.  (In this collection, the date is actually the date the image was created.  Very nice.)    Note that I've done a search for all "aerial" images, and then time restricted the images.  
Aerial View of Alamo Plaza San Antonio, General Photograph Collection, 083-1019,
UTSA Special Collections
 Most places seem to have some kind of aerial collection--the challenge is to find it (and then the next challenge is to figure out how to use each collection's sometimes wonky interface).  
A nice listing of Texas photograph collection can be found here Texas Historical Imagery Archive.  

 * 

What about the more general case?  Here's a listing of some of the US nation-wide collections you might consider:  

USGS Earth Explorer: The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides access to satellite and aerial images of various areas. It's especially useful for historical aerial photography.  (However... Difficult to use.  Often you can find the image metadata, but then you have to go elsewhere to actually download or purchase the images.)  

OpenAerialMap: A platform that offers free and open access to a variety of aerial imagery collected from different sources.  (But really spotty coverage. Very little in my area.) 

Historic Aerials: Good collection, but very similar to Google Earth's archive image function.  Costs money (and has annoying ads).    

Google Earth: There is a web version of Earth, but the application is MUCH better.  It's very easy to look back in time.  Here are the Google Earth images of Montmartre from 1949 and 2023. Contrast these with the photo at the top of the post taken by balloon in 1866. 

SearchResearch Lessons 

When you're searching for archival aerial images, there are a few things to keep in mind... 

1. Not everything is online--Trust me on this. A LOT of archival images are still stashed away in archive and library collections.  You might have to physically visit the collection in order to find what you really need.  Don't pass up the chance to visit the archive in person.  (You cannot believe the things I've found just because I was there.  The number of times an archivist has said to me "this isn't cataloged yet, but I think you'll find it interesting" is amazing.  Don't miss the chance to visit! 

2. Images are often in collections, but often NOT in the collection you might expect.  I managed to find a bunch of great aerials of San Francisco from the 1920s... in the collection of the University of Nebraska.  Keep your search broad and run down all of those leads.  You never know when you'll find the aerial image you want. 

3. When doing image searches, switch to black-and-white mode when you can.  That often helps limit your searches to early images. 

4. Call the librarian or archivist!  Really!  I made about a dozen calls when researching this post, and uniformly, they answered the phone (or actually called back).  Real humans are a great resource, especially as they can translate what you really meant to say into a working search.  

5. Realize and accept that searching for images is about the trickiest thing you can do.   The language and technology is complicated, but that's why you're a SearchResearcher!  You can learn words like orthoquad  and understand why they're useful.  Spend the time to learn about the field--it will pay off. 

Keep searching! 

SearchResearch Challenge (8/14/24): Finding the earliest aerial photos from your area?

 Photos from the heavens... 

Early aerial photo by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, aka Nadar, from a hot air balloon.
Near Montmartre, Paris, 1866. P/C Wikimedia.
... can reveal marvelous things.  Here's a 19th century white horse depicting King George carved into the hillside in southeast England. 

Osmington White Horse from 1808.  P/C/ Google Earth (2024)
As we saw last week, it's possible to find aerial photos of a particular region, but often tricky to find ones that are exactly of the place you want, and taken at the time you want. 
In searching for the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area, I was constantly looking at images that were close... but not quite on target.  Or I was looking at images that were a decade too late for the traces I was seeking.  
I bet I'm not the only person with this issue.  So let's do some collective problem-solving on this and figure out... 
1. What's the best way to find the earliest possible aerial photos taken of some area?  As we work on this, tell us how you found the earliest aerial images of the place where you live (Vancouver Island, Mexico City, Portugal, Rio de Janeiro, etc.)  
I wanted early aerial images of the area close to Stanford, Palo Alto, and Mountain View.  I found some.  More importantly: What lessons should we learn about finding aerial photos?  IS there a general method for finding historic aerial imagery?  Or does every place have it's own special and particular story?  
Let us know in the comment thread below.  

Keep searching! 

Even more: Can you find the shellmounds?

 Fascinating... 

Shellmound in Emeryville, CA, party torn apart. From Publications in American Archaeology and
Ethnography Journal, V 23 (1926)

Last week's Challenge was great fun, and as I mentioned, I spent a lot of time on this.  The Challenge definitely captured my Joy of Search!    

The original motivation for the Challenge came from walking past this bronze plaque that's in my neighborhood.  

But I have to take a this week off from SRS as I'm spending the next few days in Atlanta doing a annual site review for an NSF AI and healthcare project (AI-CARING).  Each year, NSF invites a small panel of folks in the field to review the work done over the past year and suggest, if needed, any changes to the plan.  So I'm kinda busy this week. 

However... as I mentioned, I found a LOT of material that I couldn't quite compress into last week's post.  If you looked through the comments, you'll see that lots of Regular Readers also found fascinating materials as well.  

One of the motivations for the Challenge was walking past this plaque at the corner of Middlefield Road and Webster Street, very near Marion Avenue in Palo Alto. 

 I looked high and low for an aerial photo of this area (or of the Castro and/or Ponce Shellmounds) taken before 1948.  I know that in 1948 the Castro shellmound was in the process of being deconstructed and sold as fertilizer.  You saw the best pix I could find in last week's story.  I just was not able to find great aerial photos from the before times.  Unfortunately.  

Interestingly, if you look up this plaque, you'll quickly find an essay by Benjamin Wright about this location, its geology, and the mounds that were here and how they were made.   

As he wrote: 

"The Muwekma/Ohlone would collect shellfish on a daily basis during the winter months, as it was their main staple at that time of the year. According to [Margolin], they typically returned to their villages with a day’s catch that was usually abundant. By the year’s end “they had collected literally tons of mussels, clams, oysters, olivellas, crabs, gooseneck barnacles, abalones, and other shellfish. As centuries passed the discarded shells piled up at village sites to form mounds. Some of these mounds were as much as thirty feet deep, some a quarter of a mile across . . . ”  These shellmound sites, also referred to as middens, or shell middens, by archaeologists, were reinforced with a mixture of soil and refuse [Chartkoff and Chartkoff]. 

Searching in Newspapers.com with location set to Palo Alto and searching before 1960, you can find articles that discuss the mounds, their locations, and what happened to them.  Here are a couple of samples:  

The Peninsula Times Tribune, Nov. 27, 1906.— The interest of scientists has been aroused by the discoveries made at an old Indian mound at Castro station, three miles south of here. The mound is owned by J. P. Ponce of Mayfield, who has been using its soil for fertilizer. Many skeletons of wild animals and human beings were unearthed in addition to various Indian ornaments and a vast quantity of sea shells. Prof. Harold Heath and Prof. J. O. Snyder of Stanford have investigated the mound and propose to make further excavations and send a collection of the relics unearthed to the National museum at Washington. The mound is the largest, yet found in this valley, being two acres in extent.

Another news article describes it as 

"300 feet (100 meters) in diameter and 10 feet high...even at that time (1893) ..they were the sites of villages... and the mounds contained the discarded shells as well as the bodies of the departed...during the early days of Stanford, you really hadn't lived until you had gone down to Castro and dug yourself up a skeleton or two."  

The mound also contained... 

"...whistles made of birds' bones, flint arrow-heads, beads of abalone shells, and mortars and pestles are among the booty now resting in museums or in private homes."  (PTT, Nov 19, 1946) 

Of course, since the Native American made mounds near streams, and streams are just about everywhere in the Bay Area, it's no surprise that there were many mounds.  The Nelson map included some 425 sites, but the full Nelson report comments that "it is not to be supposed that 425 exhausts the evidences of aboriginal occupation..."  

In my searches I found yet another map of shellmounds made by local historian and part-time surveyor Jerome Hamilton in 1937.  This shows the shellmounds around the city of San Mateo, along San Mateo and Blackhawk creeks.  

P/C San Mateo Historical Association
This map is in the San Mateo County Historical Association archives.  I found a reference to it in my Google search for shellmound maps, and was amazed to learn that it wasn't online, but if you just could stop by and visit the archive, you could see the map in person.

I spent a while with the map.  If you measure the distance between the railroad and El Camino Real (the major street in the area--neither the street nor the railroad have probably moved much in the past 67 years), we find it's nearly 500 meters.  

If the shellmound shown in the map (number 12) is depicted accurately, it's roughly 166 meters wide, much larger than the Castro mound.  

It's not a huge surprise that there are so many shellmounds in the SF Bay Area--they seem to have be made where there were people and streams.  If there was a stream that flowed into the Bay, you could pretty much reliably find a mound next to it.  In the following map you can see another dozen or so sites that we not included in the Nelson 1909 map.  Here's just what I located by map-diving... note that there was a stream every mile or two.  

As a consequence, there are MANY mounds... including some that are still being discovered today as people dig up the soil to do new construction.  Example: The new construction at "Elco Yards" in Redwood City, 37.4800228683888, -122.22562046367638 , just north of Palo Alto by a few miles. In an article from 2013, artifacts and bones were discovered while digging causing a long pause while the site was excavated and the remains repatriated.  

After the Guide to Bay Area Creeks. Each red dot is a shellmound that I found via online research as described.  Original base map based on work  Guide to San Francisco Bay Area Creeks
As several authors have noted, Native American groups pretty much made mounds everywhere they went.  In my immediate neighborhood between Adobe and Matadero Creeks, I found reports of 5 or 6 mounds.  All of them long gone--carted away for fertilizer or buried under omnipresent construction. Stanford University, just 15 minutes away by bicycle has at least 60 sites on campus.  Just to the left of the ninth tee on the campus course, on a rise overlooking the nearby road, is a curiously shaped rock with a circular depression on top. A plaque informs golgers that the outcropping is an Indian grinding stone, once used by the Muwekma-Ohlone people to crush acorns into flour.  It's a huge rock that was on a great site--near a stream and thousands of oak trees.  A great place to live and create a mound or two.  

Bottom line: This is all pretty much Native land everywhere, with home places, village, and mounds everywhere throughout the Bay Area.  With a bit of online search, you can discover truly remarkable things--in this case, traces of people who lived here long ago, and stories that I never knew.  

As always, Keep Searching! 

==============

Chartkoff, Joseph L., Kerry Kona Chartkoff. The Archaeology of California. Stanford U P, 1984. 

Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area. Heyday Books, 1978.

Answer: Can you find the shellmounds?

It can be just too much fun... 

Shellmound in Emeryville, CA, party torn apart. From Publications in American Archaeology and
Ethnography Journal, V 23 (1926)
... and that's been the case here. 

It's fairly easy to answer the Challenge overtly, but looking up one thing leads inevitably to another in a chain of curious questions.  It's not ratholing, exactly, but I have spent an awful lot of time looking into this question.  

Here's last week's Challenge: 

1. I want to know if I NOW live near any Native American shellmounds. (By "near," I mean within 5 miles / 8km.)  Can you find a map that shows an extensive set of shellmounds in the SF Bay Area?  Are any of those near Mountain View, CA?   (Extra credit: Can you find any images of the nearest shellmounds?)   

The fast answer to this is to do a search like: 

      [ map shellmound San Francisco California ] 

and you'll find the Shellmound.org website, which has a lovely series of maps documenting the changes to the West Berkeley shellmound over the years.  On that site we read:

 "The archaeological site is officially known by the number CA-ALA-307, because archaeologist Nels Nelson gave the West Berkeley Shellmound #307 when he mapped 425 shellmounds around San Francisco Bay in 1904."  

That sounds like a map we need to find.  

Luckily, the second hit is a link to a Wikimedia map, labeled "Map of San Francisco Bay Area Showing Distribution of Shell Heaps."  Shell heaps is a synonym for Shellmound.  Following the links back, you'll find this map is from Nelson, Nels Christian. Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Region, Vol. 7. No. 4. University Press, 1909.  

This is the lower right corner of the map on page 349 where you can see: 

Shell Heap map by Nelson, 1904 Wikimedia (Note that this is a large, high-res file.)

See that entry for Mountain View (bottom center), with the town of Palo Alto just above Mayfield?  Just above Mountain View is "CASTRO," next to the long line indicating a railroad.  Just above CASTRO is a dot labeled 356.  Following the convention in the Shellmound.org site for labeling archaeological sites, we might try a search for "CA-SCL-356" and see what happens.  

(Why SCL?  Because in the site code above,  the ALA refers to "Alameda" county.  Mountain View, Palo Alto, and CASTRO are all in Santa Clara county.  Hence the 3-letter acronym SCL. These codes are known as Smithsonian trinomials. Most historic sites in the US have a trinomial.)  

So, let's guess that this is the naming convention for archaeological sites in California and search for:  

     [ "CA-SCL-356" ] 

This leads us quickly to the Cooley Landing: Cultural Resource Inventory and Assessment with this map in it:

The southern part of San Francisco Bay, showing major shellmounds in the area. 
This is a modified version of the map in the Cooley Landing report SMA-77 is
fairly near the Cooley Landing site. (after Hylkema, 1991)

The "Cooley Landing" report is an cultural resource assessment and inventory that's done before any major construction project can take place.  Such reports have been required ever since the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969. Before tearing up the place, the project has to write a comprehensive "cultural assessment" covering Native American places and artifacts.  

Such reports often have an impressive amount of detail about things like village sites, archaeological resources, and things like shellmounds.  In the Cooley Landing report we read that:

"Between 1909 and 1912, Lewellyn Loud from the University of California at Berkeley surveyed the South Bay and plotted the locations of many mound sites including clusters of them within, and adjacent to the project area. In 1912, Loud tested one such mound, SCL-1 (also known as the Ponce and Castro Mound and formerly designated by Nelson as SCL-356 in the City of Mountain View). This site was located within three miles of the current project location... It was noted that the mound was 8 feet high and broader than a football field."  Cooley Landing report

So now we know about a shellmound also known as the Castro Mound and another mound known as the Ponce mound (SCL-1).  

A quick search for: 

     [ Castro shell mound ] 

takes us to the Wikipedia page for the Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, which also tells us that the Castro shellmound was there, reportedly 400 feet long, by 300 feet wide, and 10 feet high.  (121 m long, by 100 m wide, by 3.3 m high) 

I thought it would be nice to find an image of the mounds. I searched a nice archive of Mountain View historic photos (hosted by library), but don't find anything.  The town to the north is Palo Alto, so I thought I should try that.  Sure enough, a search for 

     [ Palo Alto historic photos ] 

leads to the Palo Alto Historical Association digital photo collection.  In that interface I searched for [mound], [shellmound], and find that both of those searches fail. 

However, adding the term INDIAN to the search--[Indian mound]--leads to the "Aerial view of Indian Mound" Shown below: 

Castro Shellmound (CA-SCL-356) P/C Palo Alto Historical Association,
Guy Miller photo collection.  (Ca. 1941)

Footnote:  Yes, I know the term "Indian" isn't politically correct, but it IS the index term of art.  Perhaps eventually all of the indexes in the world will be updated, but if you want to find something, you have to adopt the terminology that's in use in the database. 

This was fairly successful, but I thought perhaps I could find an aerial photo of the area of SCL-1 and SCL-356 at the Stanford Earth Sciences library.  There, with the help of their incredibly energetic and wonderfully helpful Map Librarian Zoe Dilles I was able to locate a few hundred photos, both in hardcopy prints, and at the UC Santa Barbara Collection called FrameFinder.  With Zoe's help I was able to dig deep in to the aerial photo archive and find a few images that come close, but are not quite high enough resolution to definitively pin down the location.  

The Monta Loma neighborhood. April 1, 1948.  Flight CDF5, Frame 2-83

I spent several happy hours looking through the various "flights" of aerial imagery that was from the late 1940s, I wasn't able to find anything that was obviously correct.  The shellmounds are in the above image, but it's hard to find them just visually.  (I think I see them, but it's a tough one to validate.)  

So... the bottom line here is that YES, there are several shellmounds in the Mountain View / Palo Alto area.  In fact, within a 10km (6.2 mile) radius of my house, I was able to identify at least 7 different shellmounds, none of which have any above-ground presence.  

Another helpful article in this search was There were once more than 425 shellmounds in the Bay Area. Where did they all go?  The short answer is that they were mined for the quality of the soil and/or for the artifacts within them.  (Turns out that giant piles of shells turn into high quality fertilizer over the years.)  

2. A big part of my family hails from the area around Rice Lake, WI.  Are there any Native American mound structures there?  If so, where?  

This wasn't hard either:  

     [ Rice Lake Wisconsin mounds ] 

quickly leads you to the Wisconsin First Nation's Rice Lake Mound group.  As they say on their web page, 

"The group once consisted of fifty-one conical burial mounds, apparently built after about a.d. 500. Some mounds were excavated in the nineteenth century by the Smithsonian Institution during its search for the identity of the mound builders, while others were excavated in the 1950s. Many were obliterated by city expansion." 

This has been, unfortunately, the fate of many mounds over the years.  But it is a lovely park: 

I have to say that I spent probably 30 hours on this Challenge... it was just WAAY too interesting.  The more I searched, the more I found.  I went to a couple of different museums and archives in doing this research--maybe I'll get around to telling you those stories another day.  

The thing that impressed me the most is exactly how much material is still available online, if you search across different resources.  We've talked before about how using multiple sources is a way to both triangulate AND to inform mutual lines of research.  

I didn't mention it here, but I also found that looking through archives of old newspapers (primarily Newspapers.com) was incredibly valuable for getting the same information in slightly different ways.  It's also fascinating to see what the reporting was like back in the day.  An article from the March 31, 1909 Peninsula Times Tribune (page 6) reports that "..“the Ponce, Huff, Rengstorff, Abelee, Crittenden, Farell, Somers, and Ynigo ranches all contain mounds.... Sanborn ranch had artifacts.  Ynigo was granted Rancho Posolomi, aka Rancho Yñigo.  Posolmi village was the name of the village..."  that was there before the Europeans moved in.  

The Ynigo ranch folks found "... mortars, sorcery stones, bone combs, abalone money, skeletons, hatchets, mussel, oyster, clam and small birds..." And, of course, arrowheads. 

In another article I found that at the location of the current Google X building, when the area was still being worked for initial construction in the 1960s, local boys could collect arrowheads and bits of pottery--things that were mostly taken home for personal displays.  

That was then.  Today, these are mostly invisible.  Some have been returned to the local First Nation tribes, but many, many things have vanished into the mists of history.  

SearchResearch Lessons

1. When you see codes that are meaningful, figure out what they are so you can use them too.  In this case, the Smithsonian trinomials are incredibly useful for finding inventories and assessments of cultural artifacts.  Learn what those codes are and use them.  

2. Look for maps.  People LOVE to make maps.  By searching for maps of cultural sites (esp. shellmounds), I was able to find a lot of shellmound locations that I hadn't expected.  

3. Keep in mind that your search terms might not be their search terms.  I started with shellmounds, but learned later that people often index them until "shell mounds" or "middens" or "shell heaps"... etc.  Similarly, if they use a term like "Indian" (especially in historical contexts), you'll have to use the terminology that they used to use, even if it's not what we would say today.  Put your mind back into their time and use the words they'd use.  (Remember we've talked about this before!  Effective searching with old terms.)  

Keep Searching! 

SearchResearch Challenge (7/24/24): Can you find the shellmounds?

 Some ancient constructions are not made of stone... 

Shellmound in Emeryville, CA, party torn apart. From Publications in American Archaeology and
Ethnography Journal, V 23 (1926)
... but are giant piles of debris.  Throughout much of the world, these middens or shellmounds, or shell heaps are built up over centuries.  

While driving over to Berkeley the other day, I crossed a road called Shellmound Street, which apparently was originally the road leading to the shellmound shown above.

There are lots of stories about the shellmound on Shellmound Street.  It apparently once had a dance hall on top of it, and an amusement park off to the side. It was there until 

Over the years I've seen shellmounds and "regular" Native American mounds at various places around North America.  While the Emeryville shellmound is probably the biggest one I've lived near, the size of it made me wonder if there weren't a few others in the San Francisco Bay area. 

Today's SearchResearch Challenge is fairly simple, but getting a good quality answer might be tricky.  

1. I want to know if I NOW live near any Native American shellmounds. (By "near," I mean within 5 miles / 8km.)  Can you find a map that shows an extensive set of shellmounds in the SF Bay Area?  Are any of those near Mountain View, CA?   (Extra credit: Can you find any images of the nearest shellmounds?)   

2. A big part of my family hails from the area around Rice Lake, WI.  Are there any Native American mound structures there?  If so, where?  

Let us know HOW you found the answer to these Challenges!  They're not hard, but as I suggested, sometimes it's difficult to find a really high resolution map that we can use to answer the questions. 

Keep Searching!