Dangerous Fieldwork

We've known for a long time that scientific fieldwork can be dangerous. Roy Chapman Andrews was attacked by bandits for example. And for women, it's been publicly known for a few years now that there is massive harassment, by their scientific colleagues, in the field (and the lab, and the classroom, and the rest of academia. Yikes.).

But the foreign government allowing the research in the first place? They're not supposed to represent much of a physical danger. Yet here we have a researcher,  28 year-old Cambridge PhD student Giulio Regeni, who was apparently tortured and killed by the security apparatus of "President" Sisi in Egypt. Sisi came to power in what amounted to a counter-democratic coup. The longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak resigned after public protests over his reign, and Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood political party, was elected afterwards. The Egyptian military ultimately balked at this, initiated a coup, and used a tremendous amount of violence (killing more than 800 people in one instance) to suppress not only the Muslim Brotherhood but any dissent.

So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising to learn that they kidnapped him, burnt and tortured him, and ultimately killed him. In addition to the plain old evilness of this regime, it shows that the Sisi government is not really thinking about researchers in Egypt. It should be obvious that there's a tremendous amount of field and other research going on in the land of the Pharaohs & Fatimids. Also recall that the dinosaur Spinosaurus aegypticus was first discovered there, and that the Fayum is an amazing and important primate fossil site. There's a huge number of researchers there, in fact there's entire field schools that operate under this same government and security apparatus.

Luwians the Trojan War and wannabe Schliemanns

Schliemann was the famous discoverer of Troy, who made the possibility of it's fabled Trojan War seem a little more realistic. He bucked the authorities and the prevailing knowledge of his time.

Also a straight up pimp?

So, ever since his discovery, people have tried to emulate him. In fact this isn't really something that was brought about by Schliemann's success; people certainly claimed to be rebel scientists before even Galileo was around. Schliemann particularly comes up here because of this article interesting and highly critical article from Jason Colavito:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/swiss-geoarchaeologist-claims-lost-luwian-civilization-caused-the-bronze-age-collapse-and-the-trojan-war

There Colavito discusses Eberhard Zangger's idea that Troy, and it's fall, is the ground-source for the Atlantis mythos. Zangger ties this Atlantis-via-Troy idea up with 'secret and suppressed history' and ancient lines of kinds. So Aeneas meets the Davinci Code I guess.

The Luwians did it?

Here's Zangger's site promoting the idea. The other thing that gets distorted here is that the Luwian language---a real thing---is blown up into 'the Luwian people' These Luwians are part and parcel of the fall of Troy. Except they didn't exist.  It's a language, but not a people, not like, say, German or Hittite, which were both languages and peoples.
This is an odd thing that lots of people seem to do, assuming a language group also represents an ethnic people and a culture. This isn't the case now, you don't need to be an Anglo practising the English culture just because you speak English. More people today speak English as a second language than as a primary language too. In the past this sort of thing would've also happened. So lots of people could be Luwian speakers without being 'the Luwians'.

So the Luwians, apparently, didn't do it.

GIS or Lidar experience?

Got an undergrad degree in Geology?
Have at least a year's worth of grad coursework in GPS (and didn't end up in a lake?) and/or LIDAR and the like? 
Then apply for this USGS job in California. The work involves GIS and mapping in a science center.
The listing closes in about a week.


https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/437878400/