Archaeology operates in an increasingly data-mediated world in which data drive knowledge and actions about people and things. Famously, data has been characterized as “the new oil”, underpinning modern economies and at the root of many technological transformations in society at large, even assuming a near-religious power over thought and act…[Read more]

Debate response to AYCOCK, J. 2021. The coming tsunami of digital artefacts. Antiquity 95: 1584 – 1589
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2021.84

Chapter looking at effects of computer technology on archaeological practice

A key development in archaeology is the increasing agency of the digital tools brought to bear on archaeological practice. Roles and tasks that were previously thought to be uncomputable are beginning to be digitalized, and the presumption that computerization is best suited to well-defined and restricted tasks is starting to break down. Many of…[Read more]

The hype surrounding the impending mainstreaming of Virtual Reality can seem to prioritize the digital above the critical. With the development of VR said to be at a pivotal point, there is an important opportunity to consider the emergence of virtual heritage and its potential futures. This paper argues that there is a disjunction between the…[Read more]

The availability and accessibility of digital data are increasingly significant in the creation of archaeological knowledge with, for example, multiple datasets being brought together to perform extensive analyses that would not otherwise be possible. However, this makes capturing the silences in those data—what is absent as well as present, w…[Read more]

This paper presents a grand challenge for Digital Archaeology of a different kind: it is not technical in and of itself, it does not seek out technological solutions for archaeological problems, it does not propose new digital tools or digital methodologies as such. Instead, it proposes a broader challenge, one which addresses the very stuff of…[Read more]

A keynote presentation at the 2012 Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA) conference in Southampton (UK) proposed the use of grand challenges as a vehicle for identifying and pursuing major advances in Digital Archaeology. At the same time, it was argued that this should be a collaborative venture. This was taken…[Read more]

Increasing access to open data raises challenges, amongst the most important of which is the need to understand the context of the data that are delivered to the screen. Data are situated, contingent, and incomplete: they have histories which relate to their origins, their purpose, and their modification. These histories have implications for the…[Read more]

Since the mid-1990s the development of online access to archaeological information has been revolutionary. Easy availability of data has changed the starting point for archaeological enquiry and the openness, quantity, range and scope of online digital data has long since passed a tipping point when online access became useful, even essential.…[Read more]

Defining what constitute archaeological practices is a prerequisite for understanding where and how archaeological and archaeologically relevant information and knowledge are made, what counts as archaeological information, and where the limits are situated. The aim of this position paper, developed as a part of the COST action Archaeological…[Read more]

This paper addresses the nature of digital scholarship and discusses the challenges for digitally engaged researchers in archaeology and elsewhere who find that the move to digital scholarship alters the terms of engagement in both the institutional and the personal context. For example, digital methods can counterintuitively lead to increased…[Read more]

Archaeological data is always incomplete, frequently unreliable, often replete with unknown unknowns,
but we nevertheless make the best of what we have and use it to build our theories and extrapolations
about past events. Is there any reason to think that digital data alter this already complicated
relationship with archaeological data? How…[Read more]