About


IMG_0414Hi.

My name is Ben Price and welcome to my website. I am a middle aged husband and father of an autistic 6 year old, and I also happen to specialise in virtual applications in archaeology.

My background in archaeology started in 1996 when I undertook my BSc Archaeology at York University. At the time I remember being very surprised that computers didn’t play as big a role in the lives and work of the archaeologists around me as it did in the wider world. My assessed seminar was a bit of a shambles due to the lack of assistance getting a digital projector and a computer with an internet connection in the same room! (In the end I had to take pictures of webpages and turn them into slides!).

I left the archaeological world (partly through Real Life™ and partly from loss of contacts) and have worked in media, computer games development, retail and IT for the last 16 years. I completed an MSc Archaeological Practice course at the UHI’s Archaeology Institute  in 2016 and used my years of varied experience to develop new areas of research.

My masters dissertation centred around finding to what extent 3D scanning and model creation can assist our understanding of Iron Age non-ferrous metal working at The Cairns broch site in South Ronaldsay, Orkney.

This has lead to various other things including developing a range of jewellery in association with the Orkney Archaeology Society and the Orcadian jewellers Ortak.

Over the next 2 years I developed a PhD proposal that focused on investigating whether the current resurgence of Virtual Reality (VR) hardware can facilitate archaeological landscape research methods. This work aimed to build on the excellent work of Dr Stuart Eve and hoped to see if using a “stereo-visual” delivery method allows a greater depth data manipulation and dissemination.  While the PhD project was conducted at the University of Kent, a failure in supervision standards and trying to conduct a tech-heavy in a classics department lead to a the project being deemed “not of sufficient quality for submission for PhD” after 3 years despite independent assurances that it was. While this was deeply disappointing, I decided not to submit for a lesser MPhil and am now engaged as an independent researcher.