Digital archaeology bridging method and theory pdf

Green Recording techniques used during the excavation of the Batavia. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 5 2 Bateman, J. Internet Archaeology 8. Envisioning the past: archaeology and the image De Reu, J. Plets, G. Verhoeven, P. De Smedt, M. Bats, B. De Maeyer, J. Deconynck, D. Herremans, P.

Laloo, M. Van Meirvenne and W. De Clercq Towards a three-dimensional cost-effective registration of the archaeological heritage. Journal of Archaeological Science 40 2 Dechert, P. Third, they allow one to efficiently model and simulate real world processes in order to understand complex interacting processes of humans in their environments. Fourth, they make possible the creation of virtual worlds that are independent of actuality.

Fifth, digital technologies allow one to transmit all of these manipulations, representations, and words around the earth at almost the speed of light to an increasingly worldwide audience.

Digital Archaeology 10 The result of course is that archaeologists are becoming part of the increasingly widespread digital village. This village is characterized by a lack of contiguity, distance and identity. Distance between archaeologists—between archaeologists and their sites— and between archaeologists and their artefacts are becoming systematically less important.

Archaeologists communicate with their laboratories, colleagues, and even Figure 1. Communication is through wire or more frequently wireless connections to the internet. One brings more and more powerful computing to the field where communication problems are significant.

Thus, even when the digital wireless communication systems are insufficient sophisticated field analysis may be undertaken. A new village is defined by archaeologists, including other specialists such as geologists, palynologists, geographers, economists, etc.

The lack of identity in this digital village has important consequences. The boundaries among professional archaeologists, amateur archaeologists, other professionals and the general public become increasingly fuzzy and even disappear. One cannot assume the background or qualifications of an archaeologist or member of the nonarchaeological professional public who sends one an email or is responsible for an archaeological ezine, web-site, or e-journal.

Given that the digital village is so open one cannot tell who reads and views archaeological web pages or e-journals. The content, such as locations of archaeological sites or artefacts, must be better protected in the digital world. The ease for antiquities to be sold legally or illegally is enhanced through reputable markets such as eBay and less reputable markets where antiquities are sold between individuals who never need to reveal their real name or even location.

Finally, the illicit trafficking in antiquities also is hindered by new digital methods to trace and track stolen artefacts. It is important to note that the digital village is changing at an increasingly rapid rate. There is a process of cyber mutation which means that information technology changes very quickly. It cannot be linked to any single technology or media. In the same way that ink is extinct, both sizes of floppy disk are dead, and CDs and DVDs are on their way out, new digital and e-technology are created, which in turn recreates the village in numerous ways.

This paper was composed on four computers using a jump disk that fits one gigabyte onto the same keychain that has my automobile keys. Linux replaces Windows, open systems replace closed computing, and graphics replace text. But for the purposes of this paper it is not where the technology is moving that is important, but rather where the archaeologists are moving.

It would appear each archaeologist chooses where on the scale of cyber-innovation and retrogression they are comfortable. There is a role for each of them. Multiple reflections: epochs and mythos Epochs A construal based upon epochs suggests that the digital revolution is one more in a long history of technological developments. The toolmaker and tool user are well-developed metaphors central to archaeological discussions. They move through well-defined stages. All of us describe epochs by their most important technological developments.

Thus, the plough, the factory and the computer represent an agrarian, industrial and information age. Each tool has been used to conquer nature. This is not a new argument, and it has been discussed from Bacon Bacon ; Bacon and Montagu through Kapp Kapp Technology is a tool to control nature, and archaeologists—similar to other workers—use their new tools to find and control the past. Digital Archaeology 12 Mythos There is a perspective that suggests new technologies create new worlds.

The factory system, telephone, automobile, television and nuclear energy have each promised a new and glorious age. Our faith is unsheakable even when presented with the non-conforming reality that it delivers occasionally and unpredictably. There is a redemptive and messianic quality about the myth for the new technocrats.

Refugees fled and solved their Old World problems by moving to the New World—a type of redemption for European migrants. It was a type of deliverance for early American colonists fleeing the developing establishment in the East. Similarly moving from one type of information technology to another conforms to this pattern of salvation for twentieth-century technocratic migrants.

Each innovation is grasped even though the transformation from one technology to another has major costs. The archaeological technocrats of digital archaeology conform to this redemptive pattern. New technology not only abolishes the old—the old technology, the old environment, and the old practitioners—it becomes the new environment.

Not only is technology relevant for methodology, it is determinative of some aspects of theory. It is self-referential. Digital archaeology by its nature must grow out of the increasing use of digital technology. By creating and recreating technology, one determines the future and refines the solutions to the problems with which one must be concerned. Digital archaeologists create problems that require digital solutions.

A couple of final points are worth mentioning. First, it is dangerously naive to assume that redemption is mono-causal. It equally is unsophisticated to suggest that one might be saved by technology as by a single school of theoretical thought. Second, it is important to ask from where within society technological progress originates. This paper proposes that those who have the power to introduce a new technology will usually also have the power to either create or stimulate a consumer class to use the technology.

Once that happens, there are new practices, relationships and identities that supplant the old. Historical enabling and correlations If one takes an admittedly simplistic view of the history of archaeology and the history of digital innovation within archaeology, some trends are clear.

One is that computing has enabled some aspects of archaeology, but not others. Another is the correlations between developments in archaeological theory and events in archaeological computing. Each was the size of a standard typewriter with a keyboard of numbers and a long metal tube offset to the right containing the number registers. There must have been 30 of these Dreiden calculators. They could add, subtract, multiply and divide with a loud clacking sound as the mechanical registers moved numbers.

Each would be assigned a calculator and part of the calculation. After a week the results would be recombined. It surely limited not only what one could actually do but also to what one could aspire. Spaulding commented that the real tragedy of W.

His professional life was an unfulfilled foresight. Not only were they developed but they were academically accessible in university computing centres with early packages of statistical software. It was not until the beginning of the s that such calculation intensive tests as factor analysis were available to archaeologists.

These trends continue through many technological digital developments including the replacement of the card reader by the tape drive, the terminal, the digitizer, the floppy disk, the zip disk, etc. Even more recently, trends in modelling and simulating prehistoric environmental processes have been made easier through the existence of distributed computing, and even understanding aspects of the ancient mind is now possible through the progress in expert systems and artificial intelligence.

Table 1. The general correlation is clear. As computing has pervaded archaeology, there has been a shifting emphasis that may be generalized. From the large-scale mainframe computers, regional data sets, and behavioural models, there has been a change to small personal computers and a corresponding interest in site and sub-site specific data. In short, the digital archaeologist has moved from applications of the mainframes concerned with prehistoric Table 1.

Post-processual and cognitive archaeology It is my contention that the theoretical underpinnings of post-processual archaeology impacted the use of digital innovations unfavourably.

Postprocessual archaeology suggests that the individual and the individual mind are unique and that the primary methodology for understanding an individual is interpretation. Post- processual theory and digital technology are incompatible Whitley Post- processual is interpretive, digital is analytic.

Post-processual is deconstructive, digital is reconstructive. Post-processual is narrative, digital is measured Hodder ; Hodder ; Hodder Digital archaeology: a historical context 15 Neither post-processual nor cognitive archaeology as presently understood are completely capable of recreating the ancient mind Renfrew and Zubrow Narrative inevitably requires leaps of faith regarding both the veracity of the ethnographic present and its relevance to the past.

There also is a huge diversity in thought, aesthetics, and even perception. From this perspective, although digital processors can simulate intelligence or vision, they cannot, as presently constructed, duplicate the operational activities of thinking or interpreting, let alone believing.

Computers function numerically and sequentially while there is considerable evidence that the human mind does not do so. Multiple tasks and simultaneous thoughts frequently occur in everyday life. Additionally, digital machines operate according to algorithms—rules that computers follow step by step.

However, human mental activity such as interpretation is not limited to rule based behaviour. Differing strands of understanding are connected in new and unusual ways. Post-processualists follow the dictums of E. McCarthy The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. On the other hand, the importance of recognizing the contribution of the individual human mind and culture in constraining and diversifying computing and digital representation is an important input of the postprocessualists.

Cognitive archaeology takes the opposite position. There are generalities about the human mind that are not unique and individuals share similar thought processes including common sense knowledge and an understanding of causation.

There is a psychic unity to human kind. For cognitive archaeologists, digital archaeology has an ambitious goal. It must take what one knows about the world in general and about the past world in particular, and try to model the goals of individuals in the past.

It does this through a combination of measurement programs that model the senses, algorithms that model thought processes and goal orientation, relational databases that recreate memory, and expert systems that retrodict individual thinking. Parallel computing creates the possibility of non-sequential, non- linearity, and simultaneity. In order to reach past behaviour, past thinking must be combined with past environments. Other digital programs and data structures for representing the past environment exist.

Thus today, one may have prehistoric virtual people thinking and making decisions with consequent behaviour that may be tested against the past Costopoulos ; Costopoulos Even the amount of memory that these virtual people may access varies. Limited memory produces more successful hunter-gatherer specialists; more extensive memory better generalists Costopoulos I believe in the latter cognitive position. However, it is not the intention to argue here for why one view is better than another.

Rather, I wish to point out that irrespective of theoretical perspective there is a clear confluence of archaeological theory and digital technology. Space, geometry, time, visualization and communication GIS and digital technology in the third millennium The third millennium is here.

For archaeologists, who spend their lives understanding the increasing rate of innovation in the past, it is a daunting notion to seriously prognosticate the next century. Although trends may be foretold, the careful scholar knows there is a long distance between extrapolation and reality.

With that said, it seems likely that the digital revolution will continue to impact archaeology through both a myriad of technological changes, as well as changes in the very conceptions of space, geometry, time, visualization and sound. I give short shrift to technological changes here. The trends are clear and one needs to follow the engineering, computing, and digital literature more than the archaeological literature to be fully aware of them.

Surely, the increased power of computing, increased parallelization of computing, greater distribution of computing, and increased use of large-scale databases are inevitable, as are their concomitant data mining and pattern recognition. Similarly, smaller computers will be matched to an increasing use of wireless networks whose range and complexity will increase.

There will be a wider range of technology that will increase digital functions with increasing capabilities for digital vision cameras in all their forms , digital sound, digital memory and even digital identity.

Robotic machinery based on digital technology will improve including the robotic archaeological field digger and software will become more and more accessible. Digital archaeology: a historical context 17 The command line driven programs are being replaced by menu driven programs that will become the voice driven software of the near future.

The collection of archaeological and environmentally relevant spatial data is increasing many-fold. Innovations in this area are taking place on many fronts—including in-field digital data collection, in-field digital data analysis, long distance data analysis field to home base or home base to specialized parallel and supercomputer systems , digital photography and documentation as well as digital soil and environmental data collection.

Instead, I want to focus upon the changes in the theoretical and methodological world that will continue for at least a decade or two.

The conception of space, itself, is changing. The distinction between spatial reality—that phenomena in which humans, and other organisms, exist, move, and subsist—and the cultural construction of space will become more important as geographers continue to examine spatial perception and spatial language.

Archaeologists will increasingly apply it to understand how prehistoric societies perceived, organized, and used space. Traditionally space and secondarily time constrains individual activities, the environment, and the ability for individuals or populations to impact their environment.

Both individuals and populations have limited spatial and temporal reaches. This physical limit has been called a prism. It is a physicalist, concrete, observable realism and is not concerned with individual experiences or intentions. This type of representation assumes a set of necessities.

They are outlined in Figure 1. Recent ethnographic work illustrates many There is an indivisibility of human beings and many other entities. There is a limited life span of existence of all human and other physical entities. There is a limited ability to participate in more than one task at a time. All tasks are time demanding and are finite regarding both space and time. Space is Euclidean. Time is linear. Movement uses time. Space has a limited capacity to accommodate events because no two physical objects can occupy the same place at the same time.

Every physical object has a history or biography. Figure 1. Multi-tasking need not be sequential. Time is not linear but circular. Some movements are infinitely fast, etc. Space is non-Euclidean geometries may be haptic, affine, etc.

Culturally space does not need to be continuous with both large gaps in conception as well as perception. Thus, patchiness of the environment may be replicated in the patchiness of the cultural space. Archaeologists have emphasized the visible rather than the invisible. What is visible and invisible are not just matters of sight but of what are culturally perceived. It may be visible but not culturally seen. Conversely, it may be culturally seen but may be invisible.

If this is not evident, consider a blind person who has a culturally perceived space that is not necessarily visible to them. So, one may recalculate the relationships after dropping out the visible or the invisible and new cultural geometries and representations become apparent.

Digital maps, whether digitized or remotely sensed, will increasingly be an analytical and representative tool for archaeologists. For all of their positive assets, scalability, portability, accuracy and ease of analysis, there are problems that will become more important in the next decades. If the digital image the archaeologist is using is taken from a satellite, it must be real.

Unfortunately, frequently this perceived reality is greater than is justified. There are inherent limitations to digital maps. They are simplifications of reality— powerful simplifications—but simplifications, nevertheless, created according to rules of scale and projection. A perfect one-to-one map is a second reality and probably cannot exist. Digital maps are not the disembodied view from nowhere; rather they are located in culture, space and time.

These limitations have been well addressed by type of projection, projection point, and scale since the days of Mercator. I expect the continuation of new projections to solve new problems Wilford ; Crane It is said that in the computer world obsolescence occurs every three years.

In the more specialized digital world of GIS, it is occurring more frequently. For the last decade there has been considerable work in archaeology and GIS. In truth, a few of these have been theoretically simplistic, continuing to do the same archaeological and spatial problems but raising the technological bar. The changes are more than new problem specifications or technical changes. They are both simultaneous.

Merged together they create new subject matter. In the next decade these innovations will continue the process of creating a deeper understanding of the spatial organization of prehistoric society. The importance of digital innovations for time is equally relevant but less well understood. New, better, and cheaper digital counters make dating more accurate and more accessible. Furthermore, time absolutely is inseparable from the intricacies of human behaviour.

Cultural constructions of the past incorporate time. Whether or not it is linear will impact its digital representation. Anyone using variable subscripting to indicate time recognizes it makes a significant difference for digital modelling if one assumes that smaller precedes larger or vice versa.

Similarly, it makes a difference if digital time moves in a forward or backward direction; if it is divided into equal discontinuous segments or is continuous; if its periods are defined by first and last dates only or by first, middle and last dates or by some other system.

One knows the road map or digital remotely sensed satellite photograph of a year ago may not be useful for finding a house in a new subdivision. Maps are of a moment or a period. Sites, buildings and artefacts are ephemeral, entering and leaving maps at particular times. For example, the prehistoric landscape changes not only according to prehistoric periods but to modern ones. Consider a field attempt to relocate archaeological sites listed in the state historical preservation office files.

For example, it was found that more than 40 per cent of the sites in a particular period were either not where they were expected to be or could not be found at all.

Initially, this was thought to be caused by errors in location and that was sometimes confirmed with a digital gps. But, sometimes it was caused by the fact that the site although properly located was no longer there.

It had been destroyed since discovery. For some temporal systems, other types of digital modelling are necessary. In each he is walking by the same lake. Everything is the same except the structure of time…and this makes all the difference.

In each, causation and perception change. Time, space, and reality become reconfigured in digital visualization of archaeological sites and artefacts. Digital reconstructions of archaeological sites and their environments are becoming more important.

One needs only note the Chinese Yasuda and Miyatsuka and Turkish fortifications Summers and Branting as examples. Digital reconstructions now exist for sites in six continents. Individual objects such as vases, mummies and human fossils have also been reconstructed using this technology. Various digital systems have been developed to make it easier Vote et al. One issue that I want to emphasize has philosophical, methodological, ontological and archaeological implications.

It is the problem of indicating the different types of reality in visualization. This issue will become more and more important as digital archaeology becomes more widespread. The merging of differing realities already is a problem in the popularization of archaeology in either the tourist travel—Jorvik Viking Centre or the entertainment movie and television media—Disney industries.

Where does the Discovery channel end and archaeological reality take over? I believe that each of these should be differentiated and shown visually in the image. A differentiated fusion of these realities could be symbolized in a visualization by a clever use of digital graphic design where different amounts and types of transparency, colouring, and texturing correspond to different types of the reality e.

Thus, a wall might shade into increasing and decreasing transparency depending upon what parts of it are based upon interpolation and what parts are based upon extrapolation. However, this process may rapidly become more difficult as the number of types of modelled realities overwhelms the number of visual denotation systems. In the case of visualization, there should also be digital reflexivity.

For example, it would make sense for a wall to have a gradient showing to what degree the visualizer believes it is purely speculative or not. Finally, as in the case of digital computing, the archaeological digital village is being connected by an increasingly complex digital communication network.

The technology is an array of digital equipment and information creating the physical network infrastructure wiring, digital switches, modems, optical fibre, wireless and other satellite technologies. The aim of the article is studying modern trends in digital development and developing a universal model of digital research universities. The methodology of the research is based on the use of … Expand. Oceans of Data. In Flanders Heritage Agency was created as a central agency dealing with immovable cultural heritage — broadly defined as archaeology, architectural heritage and cultural landscapes — in … Expand.

Computers and the teaching of history and archaeology in higher education. View 1 excerpt, references background.

American Antiquity. The introductory archaeology course at the University of California at Santa Barbara has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis in the past two years.

The course has gone from a largely passive, … Expand. Education is what's left: some thoughts on introductory archaeology. In over 30 years of graduate and undergraduate teaching, I have taught everything from large introductory offerings with an audience of , to advanced undergraduate seminars, even a graduate course … Expand.

View 2 excerpts, references background. Digital Archaeology: Bridging Method and Theory. Archaeology and the information age : a global perspective. Traditional methods of making archaeological data available are becoming increasingly inadequate. Thanks to improved techniques for examining data from multiple viewpoints, archaeologists are now in … Expand. Source Analysis. Given this broad spectrum of applications and new research designs, the rising impact of computer scientific, digital techniques on archaeological and palaeoenvironmental studies becomes evident.

Yet, when considering the status quo, comprehensive collaboration between archaeology, geosciences and informatics is still rare, even though useful synergies could be generated for all parties concerned.

It is beyond debate that multidisciplinary approaches , which especially emerge at the interface of adjacent subjects, substantially contribute to a better understanding of ancient landscapes, their forming processes and the resulting cultural heritage. Open image in new window.

Apart from the above-mentioned domains governed by either archaeology or the geosciences, it is essential to consider the viewpoint of scientific computing, which has also advanced into interdisciplinary spheres over the years. Computer scientific research is often linked to explicit archaeological and geospatial aspects, e. Referring to this, Bock et al. Unfortunately, the great potential and benefits of scientific computing still have not been fully explored as to geoarchaeological investigations, even though lots of innovative approaches could actually be transferred or adapted to other research questions.

In common practice , initial project ideas for studies at the human-environmental interface do not originate from informatics. As the latter represents a very versatile, multipurpose discipline, overarching scientific questions must be developed by humanities or natural sciences, if human-environmental interactions are to be investigated Fig. In order to demonstrate the valuable synergies, which arise from interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities, natural sciences and informatics, the concept of Digital Geoarchaeology is to be promoted Figs.

As shown by the current scholarly discourse, research interest is indeed often the same and similar scientific questions are to be answered. That is why each discipline involved can ultimately benefit from mutual knowledge transfer. Digital Geoarchaeology can therefore be regarded as an intersection of disciplines that contributes to the consolidation of different academic perspectives Fig.

Contributions in computational humanities. Springer, Heidelberg Google Scholar. In: HIP 15 proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on historical document imaging and processing Gammarth, Tunisia — August 22—22, Geoarchaeology traces old trans-Saharan routes.

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