OTHER EYES: Understanding the past through bioarchaeology and digital media

Hey, good news!

I received an AHRC Early Career Grant for the Other Eyes Project.

The Other Eyes project confronts an emerging issue within archaeology: that of interpreting past people using digital technology. For over 350 years scientists have sought to recreate the worlds inhabited by our human ancestors using drawings, models and dioramas. Using 21st century digital technology, we can now use DNA recovered from skeletal remains to make 3D digital avatars of past people. But what benefits might this bring and what questions does it raise? How do we digitally reconstruct past people and does the authenticity matter? Does the ability to digitally embody a past person of a different age, sex, or with a disability change the way we think about the past? Are there significant differences between traditional 2D illustrations, museum models, and 3D avatars in the representation and understanding of past people? What are the ethics of “resurrecting” past people based on bioarchaeological evidence and can (and should) reconstructions of past people be archived to encourage their creative reuse?

Basically, the avatars research. I’m pretty excited as it brings together a lot of the smartest people I know to tackle a tricky issue that’s been on my mind for, oh, almost 15 years!

For more information, here’s the webpage: https://other-eyes.org

Archaeology in 3D at the University of York

I’ve written a blog post for the Cultural Heritage blog at Sketchfab:

https://sketchfab.com/blogs/community/archaeology-in-3d-at-the-university-of-york/

On the tours that we give to new students, we like to joke that the DAH Lab, a gorgeous barrel vault in the stately King’s Manor, was once King Henry the Eighth’s wine cellar. Sadly this is probably not true, but it is still one of the last places you might suspect would house the Digital Archaeology and Heritage Lab. The DAH Lab is the latest innovation in a long history of digital archaeology for the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. The King’s Manor is also home to the Archaeology Data Service, founded in 1996 for the long-term digital preservation of archaeological data and Internet Archaeology, an Open Access journal that has been publishing online since 1996. Amidst this storied digital history, my colleagues and I lead courses on 3D modelling, photogrammetry, GIS, laser scanning, and VR for archaeology and heritage students, at the undergraduate and postgraduate level….

Read more at the blog. Big thanks to Abby Crawford for the encouragement to post.

The “Archaeology Can” Bot

I’ve been off twitter again, and it’s done me a world of good to be away from the anxiety machine. Anyway, I subscribe to the James Murphy (LCD Soundsystems) philosophy:

The best way to complain is to make things.

I’ve wanted to make a bot for ages now, so I finally made the Archaeology Can bot. Originally I wanted it to take snips from publications, such as:

“archaeology can promote health by connecting project participants and other community members with their territories“

or

“Archaeology can make a major contribution to modern anthropology by studying the processes of European expansion, exploration, and colonialization“

The best I could do was grab an RSS from google news, so it will update with links to news articles that tell us what the press thinks that archaeology can do. And it doesn’t grab the exact quote, which is highly unsatisfying.

So then I followed Shawn Graham’s excellent tutorial and worked up a grammar in tracery that mostly works. It is certainly not a “bot of conviction” but it gives us grand and fairly meaningless statements such as:

“Archaeology can make a community.”

“Archaeology can require a planet.”

“Archaeology can pretend your past.”

“Archaeology can deliver our modern day.”

I considered making my main account into a bot, which I would find natural and good. And I may still do that someday. But for now, have a little whisper of possibility, keep on, keeping on.

Playing With Monsters: An Uncanny Digital Archaeology

Poster created by Shang Yang

I was honored and excited to be invited to give a virtual brown bag at the Stanford Archaeology Center earlier in October. I was initially worried that I wouldn’t have time to make something that would capture a virtual audience, but I decided to do my favorite thing–make trouble. For the lecture I decided to mess with the usual, expository, talking-head format through some fairly minor interventions in video editing. As my digital surrogate disgorged the lecture, I typed alongside, providing snide commentary, marginalia, etc.

At one point we were “zoom bombed” which was utterly delightful and disruptive, and I was excited that some audience members thought that it was part of the talk. It was important to me to add creativity and levity to the usual academic spiel and to try out some of the affordances we are all encountering in our new online world of information dispersal.

I received some truly excellent questions and comments from the audience, and it made me miss Bay Area archaeology in all its fine permutations. So, I’ve pasted the abstract below and the video. I’m working on a paper along the same lines, so I’d be happy for any feedback.

Abstract:

Monsters, in their sensuous, ambivalent, in-betweeness, can be an expression of creative impulse, subversion, of evidence of play within archaeology. Braidotti’s monsters “represent the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent…(the) horrible and wonderful, object of aberation and adoration.” Digital interventions are Frankenstein’s monsters, lurching somewhere between Tringham’s “faceless blobs” and an idealized ontological collective—networked and multi-faceted but still oddly homogenous. Archaeological monsters are a human and unhuman aggregate, one that digital archaeologists should recognize as we practice assembling, as Haraway states, “articulations among cosmos, animal, human, machine, and landscape in their recursive sidereal, bony, electronic, and geological skeletons.” In this lecture I discuss a monstrous digital archaeology, confounding our senses, invoking joy as a form of resistance and inviting playful interventions.

Now we are all archaeological filmmakers

I spent the last two days filming an old Çatalhöyük friend (and now colleague) David Orton for his teaching in autumn term. We’re trying to prepare, as best as we can, for most eventualities within the pandemic. As I was filming it occurred to me that this was being replicated all over the globe–that suddenly we’ll have a legion of archaeological filmmakers.

Archaeological filmmaking has always been a bit niche, falling between visual anthropology and digital archaeology, and subject to the same price/usability considerations that come with most tech. It is now relatively easy to capture full HD video and editing software has smoothed the steep learning curve of Final Cut Pro into a relatively gentle slope. And there are a lot of examples of wonderful, more extemporaneous archaeological filmmaking using iphones and instagram, tiktok, and YouTube.

Annelise Baer has been making episodes of the No Budget Archaeology Show during the pandemic and is up to episode 20. This is her episode on Cleopatra:

And Chloe Duckworth has been killing it for the past few years with her YouTube channel, ArchaeoDuck:

And there is the Interactive Pasts crew/VALUE, who go live on Twitch every Tuesday and Thursday to stream video game play and commentary. Most recently they streamed Total War: Troy played by an Archaeologist and a Historian:

But filmmaking is a leaky, sneaky medium. In my Archaeological Filmmaking class I teach the students that you need filmmaking as a basic skill to demonstrate pretty much anything else you’d like to make with tech. Oh so you made a VR reconstruction? You’ll need a short film to fully demonstrate it to audiences without headsets. Want to crowdfund? Films boost your intake.

But…are recorded lectures droning on over powerpoint slideshows movies? Probably, yes. In my article Archaeology and the Moving Image I discuss several genres within archaeological filmmaking, including the traditional, didactic expository genre, complete with “voice-of-god” narration and expert interviews that tell a definitive, if monolithic narrative. The recorded lecture is expository-on-speed, with a single narrator dragging (screaming?) students through the content. If anything the recorded lecture is a pretty damning indictment of the academic lecture in general. While droning on to myself in a darkened room, I was haunted by the hubris of the live lecture–why do I think that my wild gesticulation, anecdotes and occasional questions for the audience are that much value added?

If you are finding recording (or viewing) lectures in this way to be absolutely deadening, you are not alone. You are making a truncated version of arguably the worst kind of archaeological movie, again, expository-on-speed. There are other genres though; perhaps through all of this mad experimentation with online learning we’ll find impressionistic or phenomenological lectures. A lecture that draws from the impressionistic genre, that is “lyrical rather than didactic, poetic rather than argumentative” and that implies and evokes more than they inform (thanks Barbash and Taylor), would be incredible to behold.

Or perhaps we should just turn to the old pros at this particular medium, the dedicated YouTubers. I was chatting to Aris Politopoulos about Cringe as affect, when he reminded me of the excellent Contrapoints lecture on the topic. Or we could look at, for example, the Contrapoints Gender Critical video:

The video begins with something that is generally forbidden in lectures–a really long quote. But the quote is dramatically performed, with key passages highlighted, against a background that evokes delicate femininity. The video has extremely high production value, is very entertaining and cites current research. With costume changes. Yeah, I’m a fan.

I hear all of my fellow teachers:

“Who has time??”

“How on earth could I get this production quality?”

“I wasn’t even supposed to BE HERE today!”*

Yes, I know. But first, remember that your audience may be more used to this kind of content delivery that you are, and that we could do worse than to learn from people who are old pros at this medium. And second, even if you don’t go full Youtuber, I hope that this incursion into filmmaking, however brief, will intrigue at least a few people enough to explore movies as an incredibly productive medium to explore archaeological storytelling.

*This last one is me, as I pre-record lectures to be shown during my sabbatical, in a very tricky, instrumentalized version of telepresence

A Prehistory of the Endtimes

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An abandoned house in Qatar

Anarchism, prehistory, survivalism, experimental archaeology–these tender sinews have been braiding, unravelling, rebraiding themselves in my pandemic imagination. One person’s cataclysm is another person’s “building a new world in the shell of the old.” Anarchism and archaeology both animate liminal zones where people reimagine different ways of life, with the occasional cross-over.

Archaeological training provides an overactive imagination with a real-time augmented reality overlay that sees decay, collapse, refashioning, geological time–the seams between. And bones. Lots of bones.

When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area I walked through the smoking ruins of the 1906 Earthquake, contemplated the damp, squalid mudbrick enclosure that would become the Presidio. But what I wanted, more than anything, to see the great rolling dunes beneath the pastel Painted Ladies. The fog to nestle around great stands of trees, a fresh breeze in from the sea. Dig a couple of centimetres and find tarmac, perhaps the broken skeleton of a segway. Near futures of desolation and the ancient past, equally mythological.

Anarcho-primitivism, to deeply oversimplify, draws from archaeological constructions of the past and ethnographic research on contemporary societies to argue for small-scale societies against the deprivations of civilisation. This understanding of the past is well and truly disputed by Graeber and Wengrow. Yet like many writers, archaeologists, and anarchists, I still find myself interested in the jostling of these ideas against each other, in their collisions in fiction and experimental archaeology.

In Ghost Wall, middle class undergraduate students and a working class family collide in experimental archaeology, wherein they try to live like Iron Age Britons in Northern England. Silvie, the protagonist, is dragged by her past-and-purity obsessed and abusive father who is reliving his own patriarchal madness in the woods, bolstered by an archaeology professor. It animates some of our worst impulses in archaeology, piercing the veil into the past only to find our venal selves peering back. It was a lovely book. The archaeology undergraduates were my favourite, going along with the experiment to a certain extent, but subverting this incursion into the past by stopping by a local shop for snacks and heading off to the pub. They were gloriously useless at pastness, to their own merit.

I’m thinking in two to three generations there could be real wild children.

This theme was picked up in a New York Times article on primitivism, “How to Prepare Now for the Complete End of the World.” The article follows Lynx Vilden who was “teaching people how to live in the wild, like we imagine Stone Age people did.” The beautiful photography in the article shows people lighting fires and making tools. This was all framed within the (American) beginning of the pandemic, in that far away time of early March, 2020. Vilden is teaching people to use bones to process hides and use moss as toilet paper–as if our dystopian superabundance wouldn’t provide endless material for reuse in “endtimes” (See Station Eleven for the contra).  Still, there was some appreciation of the community and insanity that is formed around a campfire when all outside communication is cut off.

Or, sometimes not. A relative lack of fellow-feeling was apparent in another Sarah Moss book, Cold Earth, another team of archaeologists who are spending their summer on the west coast of Greenland, digging up an abandoned Norse colony. There is, of course, a pandemic on in the outside world, and this delays the extraction of the team from their field season. The director of the project flogs his team into terrible decisions–staying far too late in a season, not using the natural and cultural materials around them to improve their chances of survival. His eye is on the research potential of the site and his team suffers, and it’s hard to forgive.

So we find ourselves with a fairly miscellaneous set of skills for the end-of-world scenarios. Beware charismatic leaders. Beware ANY leaders. Use everything, purity be damned. Primitivism is based on a deeply flawed understanding of the ancient world. Take care of your team.

In Black Feminist Archaeology, Whitney Battle-Baptiste cleverly uses historical fiction to inform and disrupt (sigh, sorry) her ideas of the past–multivocality through Black storytellers is simply brilliant. I’m failing to imitate this, post-apocalyptic pandemic archaeology through science fiction and survivalism is sending us through the same tropes and indigenous-drag that have painted our lurid comic books for decades. The future-scope is cracked.

It leaves me thinking about anarchism, again. The anarchism that I imagine is fictive, but aspirational, though perhaps rather more cottage-core than primitivist. The one where we, as Graeber and Wengrow suggest, examine structural violence within the small scale. That’s where my archaeology is going, and, probably not by accident, where my politics are as well.

INELIGIBLE Exhibition: Shoe

 

Last February Doug Bailey emailed me (and many others) to see if we’d participate in a unique experiment: he would mail us artifacts from the excavations that preceded the recent construction of San Francisco’s Trans Bay Transit Center that were deemed unworthy of archival. His prompt:

In accepting the invitation, you commit to repurpose (disassemble, take apart, grind up) the artefacts that you receive so that they become the raw materials with which you will make creative work. There are no other limitations, instructions, or guidelines, beyond the suggestion that the work you make should engage contemporary social or political issues and debates. Engagement may relate to San Francisco and its current energies (e.g., the tech revolution, disenfranchisement, home/houselessness). Engagement may flow from your personal reaction to your assemblage of artefacts, or to your own personal, professional, or local political experiences, desires, and frustrations.

A few months later, I received a box with some disintegrating leather inside. I put it on my desk and thought about it for a while. I’ve been teaching filmmaking to Master’s students for a couple of years now, but most of my time behind a camera has been spent making promotional videos for York in my publicity administrative role. I really wanted to engage creatively with film again and this was the perfect chance.

The Ineligible prompt also included the line:

Ineligible urges contributors not to think of the material as archaeological, as artefactual, or as historic.

Well, damn. So over the summer I put the shoe in peoples’ hands and filmed it. Though these people happen to be archaeologists, I think I was able to draw out different encounters with materiality, beauty, and our association/disassociation with the lives of our objects. To be honest, I think I failed in that part of the prompt, but these are the stories we wanted to tell.

I was prompted to write an artist statement, and I wrote this clumsy thing:

As an anarchist, a mother, an archaeologist, I’m deeply concerned with making kin through the investigation and care of objects, places, and people. Finding a politics of joy and intimacy, and building things together as a way to resist Empire. In this short film I gave an alienated object, a child’s shoe, to my kin, the caretakers of the discarded to understand and reanimate this object, even as it disintegrated in our hands.

I was delighted when it was selected to be shown at the Ineligible exhibition curated by Doug Bailey and Sara Navarro at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Tirso, Portugal. The exhibition opens March 6, 2020.

 

Archaeology and Capitalist Realism

This is a speech I gave at a Teach-Out during the 2019 University and College Union (UCU) UK Industrial Action. We were on strike for pensions, better pay, the gender and ethnic pay gap, precarious employment practices, and unsafe workloads. We regularly hold teach-outs to provide liberatory space for teaching and discussion and the subject of this teach-out was Neoliberalism, Marketization and Education. Forgive some of the miscellaneous citation, I was away from my books. 

Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism begins by quoting Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek:

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Capitalist realism is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 2). It creates the illusion that change is impossible. It coopts any subversion and and sells it back to us. The product is you.

It is certainly easy for archaeologists to imagine the end of the world. Post-apocalyptic fabulism is not just limited to popular media and books, but also fuels our archaeological teaching and interpretation. We tell stories about death, destruction, and collapse as we sift through what is left behind. Garbology and Pompeii scenarios can help us think about durability of material culture and the stories we tell with what evidence remains.

So too it is relatively easy for archaeologists to identify Empire. Empire is the name that Bergman and Montgomery (2017, amongst others) give to the organized destruction under which we live. It is the “interlocking systems of settler colonialism, white supremacy, the state, capitalism, ableism, ageism and heteropatriarchy” (Bergman and Montgomery 2017). The commodification and monetization of…everything. The constant anxiety and depression. The ways that we measure and are measured that are destructive to learning and conviviality and that remove meaningful contributions and creativity in favor of fulfilling yet another Personal Learning Outcome, adding to your CV, conforming to grade descriptors. This manifests probably most profoundly in the horrendous mental health crisis amongst students AND educators. Are we all deeply, individually, broken, unable to cope, in need of mindfulness, “resilience training” and yoga?

Fisher cites Oliver James’ work that identifies a correlation between “rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism” (Fisher 2009, 23). The reaction to this has been what Fisher calls the “privatization of stress”—if these are all caused only by individual problems, neurology, family background, “any question of social systemic causation is ruled out” (Fisher 2009, 23). You must suffer individually, be diagnosed individually, be treated individually, submit your Student Support Plan on time and to our exact specification instead of coming together to FIGHT the thing that is making you ill. The fact that so many of our students and my colleagues suffer from poor mental health makes me sad, frustrated and monumentally ANGRY. This is the work of Empire. (With the caveat that regardless of structural causes of poor mental health, you should get help early and often)

The reason I get so angry about the organized destruction that Empire enacts upon ourselves and our communities is that we (archaeologists) have the distinctive expertise to break capitalist realism, and we don’t always seem to know to mobilize this expertise.

Three points:

1. Contemporary archaeology has been scrutinizing the links between material culture and structural violence since its inception. Rathje’s garbology showed us that all of the trash that we are putting into landfills is not rotting safely into the ground. He famously found “perfectly preserved 40-year-old hot dogs,” and a 25-year old head of lettuce. Buchli and Lucas’ (2001, ethically dubious) examination of a recently abandoned council house showed the violence of the privatisation of council housing during the Thatcher years and its potential impact on women who were the victims of domestic violence. Rachael Kiddey’s work on homelessness and more recently on migration is also relevant to this discussion. This is no surprise to this audience, but we can meaningfully use archaeological methods on contemporary assemblages to critique social and political structures.

2. We must use the creative, generative, collective forces within archaeological methods to engage in what anarchists call prefigurative politics, making small-scale versions of the societies we want to live, love and work in. Daniel Eddisford and I have identified significant instances of prefigurative politics within existing archaeological practice, both within the housing of archaeologists—how does your workspace change how you think about archaeology and how you interact with your colleagues? And, within commercial archaeological uses of single context methodology. In examining a large, extremely complex Harris Matrix from Billingsgate we found annotations in varied handwriting, with many changes, long lines of white correction fluid, and erasures.

These materialize the process of collective decision-making and interpretation through the inscription of stratigraphic relationships on paper. Individual archaeologists are able to meaningfully contribute to the site-wide narrative. The construction of a record of the stratigraphy of the site as a coherent whole is undertaken by archaeologists in conjunction with those working around them without the direct oversight of a manager. In this way archaeology can fostered a model with similarities to anarcho-syndicalism, wherein a small, non-hierarchical group works together towards a common goal, side-stepping more formalized authority. At its best, archaeology is non-alienated labor, making communities of practice instead of reproducing hierarchy.

3. People who are already fighting Empire need our help.

At the end of Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher (2009) states:

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

Bergman and Montgomery (2017) quote Silvia Federici in discussing the social amnesia imposed by Empire:

What most matters is discovering and recreating the collective memory of past struggles. In the US there is a systematic attempt to destroy this memory and now this is extending across the world, with the destruction of the main historical centers of the Middle East—a form of dispossession that has major consequences and yet is rarely discussed. Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.

Reviving the memory of struggles of the past, uncovering egalitarianism and forming critiques of social inequality is deeply important, and is the work of a small but growing cohort of archaeologists. Archaeology is the collective, deep chronological documentation of the capacity of humans to imagine different ways to live. As archaeologists we are the discoverers and keepers and storytellers of the different ways we have found to be human. Capitalist realism tells us there is only one way to be, only one way to imagine ourselves, while people trying to break free of Empire are begging for us to use our expertise to find different ways to be. The more we find out about the past, the more we find it to be a weird, wild, wonderful place. Our gift as archaeologists must be to tell stories of human resilience and diversity of experience to help people dream of alternatives to Empire.

That’s why it is so important that we come together to fight the deadening of this remit, the blunt forces of neoliberalization and marketization in education trying to subvert this gift into another avenue for capitalism.

Bergman, C., & Montgomery, N. (2017). Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. AK Press.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.

Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory 2019: CHATmethod

I’ve got secret plans and clever tricks….

Sara Perry and I are running a workshop at the CHATmethod conference at MOLA on Friday, 1 November, 2019. We tend to have a ridiculous amount of fun (and trouble) when we team up, so I don’t expect this will be any different. Register here.

The workshop: A Contemporary Context? Recording Sheets for the Sublime and Ungrateful

Description:

The archaeological context sheet has been fashioned and refashioned extensively since its adoption. These context sheets are embedded within disciplinary lineages and reflect the questions and assumptions of archaeological knowledge making, both on the intimate and global scale. In this workshop we use the context sheet as a platform for reflection and play, with a particular intention to query its utility in recording contemporary archaeological contexts.

For this workshop we envision a hands-on, creative, trouble-making session, including constructive critique and display of our various takes on the contemporary context sheet. Join us to experiment with ruining and re/designing one of archaeologists’ most ubiquitous inscription devices.

I’m also going to be on a panel discussion that evening:

Methods for the 21st century hosted by London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE.

Chaired by Janet Miller, CEO of MOLA, with Colleen Morgan (York University), Laura Hampden (Museum Detox), Neil Redfern and Isabel Nolan (artist).

I’m really excited for both events, but slightly nervous about the panel discussion. I have been investigating (and now teaching) future-facing methods in archaeology for…a while now and I hope to speak to the creativity and diversity of the archaeologists, artists, and other phenoms who have inspired me over the years.

EJA Special Issue: Digital Archaeologies

EJA_Cover
EJA cover, courtesy of David Osborne

I’m thrilled that our long labor of love, this special issue of the European Journal of Archaeology on Digital Archaeologies has finally been published. Several of the articles were available ahead of time online, but seeing it all together like this is extremely gratifying. Marta Díaz-Guardamino and I wrote an introduction to the issue, here is a brief excerpt:

Current archaeological thought evokes a sparking Catherine wheel: spinning fireworks that detonate light, colour, and sound with every movement. These theoretical turns swirl alongside the ongoing development and adoption of scientific and digital techniques that have wide-ranging implications for archaeological practices and interpretations. Two particularly combustible developments are posthumanism and the ontological turn, which emerged within the broader humanities and social sciences. Posthumanism rejects human exceptionalism and seeks to de-centre humans in archaeological discourse and practice. Linked to this is the so-called ‘ontological turn’ (aka the ‘material turn’), a shift away from framing archaeological research within a Western ontology and a movement beyond representationalism (i.e. focusing on things themselves rather than assuming that objects represent something else).

(…)

Collectively, these papers are a provocation to rethink normative practices in analog and digital archaeology before they become comfortably ossified. The papers describe play, experimentation, transgression, hope, and care as forming the basis of a posthuman archaeology and invite future researchers to engage with this work as a form of resistance. Queer, weird, monstrous, fun archaeology will never be as lauded or rewarded as mainstream digging and lab work; but it is vital to the creative lifeblood of the discipline. The sparking Catherine wheel will keep turning, inviting a new cycle of archaeological theorists to (re)imagine the complexities of archaeological interpretation. But perhaps we can stop spinning through these endless turns and start kindling revolutions instead.

The individual papers have already started to make an impact, particularly Sara Perry’s on The Enchantment of the Archaeological Record, (which she has discussed in far better terms that I could manage on her own blog) and many of the other contributions are deeply important comments on the current state of digital archaeology, and point toward productive futures in the field.

Ruth Tringham’s article, Giving Voices (Without Words) to Prehistoric People: Glimpses into an Archaeologist’s Imagination, on the emotive power of storytelling, the importance of ambiguity, and evoking the past through experimentation weaves past and present together through…a basket! (obviously!) Her presentation at the EAA was breathtaking and completely inspiring and I am happy to see it translated into this article. Like most of her work, it’s a decade ahead of its time and informed by her deep experience in digital storytelling.

Bill Caraher’s Slow Archaeology, Punk Archaeology, and the ‘Archaeology of Care’ is also a particular inspiration, as he’s been thinking about, working through, and publishing about the risks of alienation in digital work and response to this alienation through low-fi, DIY, and punk methods. I’ve obviously been a deeply interested and invested fan of Bill’s throughout the years and appreciate his approach to an Archaeology of Care. As he states:

The awareness that tools shape the organization of work, the limits to the local, and the place of the individual in our disciple is fundamental for the establishment of an ‘archaeology of care’ that recognizes the human consequences of our technology, our methods, and the pasts that they create.

Annie Danis’ Augmented, Hyper-mediated, IRL is an incredibly engaging exploration of  how the indigenous teenagers of Pueblo de Abiquiú used digital technology during the community archaeology project but also in their personal lives. She provides an example of how collaborative work could and should be, but also the fantastic insight that the time saved by paperless digital recording in archaeology can be productively used to build community. In this case, it was a zine that:

represents a significant part of archaeological research by framing the methods for data collection within the interns’ personal experiences and providing an opportunity for young Abiquiúseños to tell the story in their own words.

Katherine Cook’s EmboDIYing Disruption: Queer, Feminist and Inclusive Digital Archaeologies reviews her engagement with digital projects and the professional risks of this engagement and examines problematic power relationships within the field. She discusses disruption and support networks established to help combat “the privileging of (Eurocentric) archaeological discourse, research, and interpretations.” Mobilizing what Cook terms Disruptive Digital Archaeologies “to defy, to confront, to derail, to remix, to subvert” is a clear call for change in the way that archaeologists use digital technologies.

I’ve discussed my contribution, Avatars, Monsters, and Machines: A Cyborg Archaeology previously on this blog, but it remains an initial offering in the ways to understand the place and potential of digital practice for informing theory and knowledge production in archaeology. You know, no big.

Please read, download, immerse yourself in this series of papers as I believe they collect some of the finest current thinking in digital archaeology.

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