Tag: digital archaeology

New Article: Current Digital Archaeology

In 2020 I was asked to write an overview article for the Annual Review in Anthropology on Digital Archaeology. I was honoured to be asked—Annual Review articles are touchstones for the discipline, and in this case it was an opportunity to bring some insights from digital archaeology to Anthropology. Anthropology is considered to be the “umbrella” discipline for Archaeology in the US–less so in the UK, but that’s another blog post. Still I hesitated, as they’re not considered REF-able outputs, which unfortunately is the main currency of scholarship in the UK.

Review articles such as theses are not original research, but a critical engagement with what the author thinks are the major publications and insights in their specialism. In the end I was happy to do so as 1) I was on research leave 2) I felt less than on top of the literature since the completion of the literature review for my thesis in 2011 3) I wanted an overview article to assign to my MSc students that would reflect the current state of the discipline. And it turned out okay anyway, I still got promoted to Senior Lecturer this year, which is nice.

So: Current Digital Archaeology. It’s 6669 words long with 156 references. I obviously wasn’t able to cover everything. I left much of the review of the histories of computer use in archaeology to past experts. For this I also found Tanasi 2020 super useful, particularly in characterising the differences between US/UK. I also put parentheses around many very important parallel and subfields—such as the wide world of digital museums and computational archaeology.  I was able to signpost a few good reviews of these topics regardless. Providing an overview of current digital archaeology still felt like trying to hold water in my hands and I apologise to anyone who feels left out—it is entirely my fault and I really appreciate any suggestions for articles I’ve missed.

In the article I focussed on four interlinked themes: craft and embodiment, materiality, the uncanny, and ethics, politics and accessibility. In this I tried to unmoor practice from specific technologies and situated individual methods in broader political and theoretical debates. Additionally I tried to bring in some literature from practice-based research and multimodal anthropology, which are insightful for understanding the work of digital archaeology. Inevitably I also brought in anarchism, politics and touched on climate change, because I’m me. We are encouraged to engage with our own work within the review, though I probably over-emphasized the whole cyborg archaeology stuff and I’m finding those sections a bit cringe now. Oh well.

I want to specifically thank Alice Watterson and Ed Gonzalez-Tennant for letting me use beautiful images from their own work as illustrations of vibrant, politically engaged digital archaeology.

I wrote the bulk of the article in 2020 (perhaps should have mentioned my pandemic single parenting as broader context for the article) but was able to grab a few 2021/22 publications after the excellent peer review comments came in. I’m very sad to have missed more recent publications such as:

These incredible volumes, Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice edited by Lynne Goldstein and Ethan Watrall:

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/101232

Kevin Garstki’s edited volume: Critical Archaeology in the Digital Age:

https://ioa.ucla.edu/press/critical-archaeology-digital-age

Amongst others! I hope that mine is only one of several overviews that will contribute to critical examinations of digital archaeology.

Here’s the offprint:

xARA_Digital_Archaeology_Morgan_finalDownload

New York Times Comment on the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles

There’s a long form article in the New York Times about the Digital Archaeology Institute’s reconstruction of the Elgin Marbles. The author reached out to me for a quote regarding the initiative–I’ve taught about their efforts regarding the triumphal arch in Syria, so I felt comfortable contributing. They used a short quote, and I thought I’d include the longer comment here, as below:

3D replicas can be exciting and useful tools for archaeologists and the public to use for commemoration and to think with. Oxford’s Institute for Digital Archaeology’s previous endeavour, the 3D modelling and reconstruction of the triumphal arch from Palmyra, has been heavily criticised by archaeologists who were concerned with the funding, symbolism, lack of public consultation, and general disconnect from critical thinking by the creators of the model. Archaeologist Dr Zena Kamash from Royal Holloway, led an intervention while the model was located in Trafalgar Square. She and a team of students invited responses on postcards from visitors from the site; these responses showed the alienation of the 3D model, which was placed in a colonial setting as a proxy for British nationalism. 

I would have similar questions regarding the Oxford’s Institute for Digital Archaeology’s new project, that of replicating the Parthenon Models. Who is asking for this replication? What population does this replication serve? What are the political implications of such a pursuit? Is there a way we could be using the technology to focus on and reveal the people who created the Parthenon, rather than mechanically reproducing previous art? The repatriation of artefacts from colonial institutions to indigenous communities is an immediate and essential necessity, and of central concern to an ethical archaeological practice. When artefacts become symbols of nationalism and of state power, we need to be very careful about who we are working with and for, and to what end. 

Interestingly I also received an email lambasting me for my perceived (but incorrect) position of retaining the marbles, quickly followed by another email apologizing for their misperception.

We’ll see how many more adventures in the popular press I get this year….

Antiquity: Digital Debate

AFK Minecraft

I was asked to participate in a debate forum for Antiquity, instigated by Computer Scientist John Aycock’s The coming tsunami of digital artefacts. To greatly oversimplify, Aycock warns archaeologists that there is a lot of digital stuff and that we are not particularly well equipped to do the archaeology of digital things and we’d best get our acts together. In their respective responses, Sarah and Eric Kansa focus on archives and Jeremy Huggett discusses the definitions of digital archaeology and digital artefacts. They’re all very worthy discussions–I think it’s particularly funny that Huggett and I both lean on the old bricoleurs chestnut.

Then I go off on a Deleuzian discussion of Minecraft flint, that’s probably a bit half-baked, but it was fun and I’d like to expand on it. Then I say we can’t record all the digital things because we’d move up in the long list of environmental baddies, shades of the Borges map that covers the territory, etc. I also try to make cyborg archaeology happen. Forgive me.

An extract:

Aycock (2021) advises us to partner with computer scientists to examine the code. This is, of course, advisable for us to understand how the Minecraft flint was created, how it changed over time and is linked to other in-game affordances. We could document and potentially ‘excavate’ the Java code for the game, as Aycock and other archaeologists have done. The code, however, is one part of the assemblage that the Minecraft flint comprises, and I am equally interested in the other constituent parts. A prefigurative, embodied, feminist post-human approach—also known as cyborg archaeology (Morgan (2019); by way of Haraway (1985) and Braidotti (1997))—would encourage us to investigate the political implications of Minecraft, as its play is based in an extractionist settler colonial understanding of the world (Brazelton 2020), accompanied by a call to reconfigure the game along kin-based networks. An embodied approach would explore the effects of the digital on our bodies: on posture, bone spurs, and microplastics in our organs. A climate-aware archaeological investigation of scale and environment could help us understand how digital mining of a different kind, for example, bitcoin, is hastening global warming (Mora et al. 2018).

You can go to Antiquity to access my response:

Morgan, C. (2021). An archaeology of digital things: Social, political, polemical. Antiquity, 1-4. doi:10.15184/aqy.2021.125.

Or check it out here:

morgan_antiquity_pre_proofDownload

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.

EJA Special Issue: Digital Archaeologies

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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.

Anarchist Feminist Posthuman Archaeology – CAA 2019

I was grateful to be invited to the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA 2019) conference in Kraków, Poland this year. I participated in the Our Knowledge is all over the place! roundtable organized by Paul Reilly, Stephen Stead and John Pouncett. We had one slide and five minutes in which to discuss a bespoke “knowledge map” that captured our collective disciplinary knowledge.

I’m still digesting the discussion afterwards and my fellow panelists’ perspectives. I was pretty nervous ahead of time as I had basically made a very personal knowledge map about how I framed my own practice and it felt very revealing. I drew heavily from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and carla bergman and Nick Montgomery’s Joyful Militancy, which have been profoundly impactful in my current practice. I’ve had the kernels of these ideas for a while (see my graduation commencement speech) but the books have given me some of the language and tools to precisely address and actualize this thinking. Empire. Paranoid Reading. Alternatives, not multivocality.

I was also very happy to hear from my fellow panelists: Paul Reilly, Pricilla Ulguim, Tuna Kalayci, Katherie Cook, Lorna Richardson, Daria Hookk (et al), John Pouncett, In-Hwa Choi and Natalia Botica (et al). We all had very different takes on the concept of knowledge maps and it was illuminating to hear from everyone.

I made a loose script, which I loosely adhered to for my five minutes–if you are interested, find it below.

Continue reading “Anarchist Feminist Posthuman Archaeology – CAA 2019”

EAA 2018: Human, Posthuman, Transhuman Digital Archaeologies

I’m very excited to announce that Catherine Frieman, Marta Diaz-Guardamino Uribe and I are co-organizing a session at the European Association of Archaeologists meeting in Barcelona, 5-8 September. We’d love you to join our session!
Title: Human, Posthuman, Transhuman Digital Archaeologies
Abstract:
Our engagement with the digital is reformulating the ways in which we (post/humans) engage with/create our worlds. In archaeology, digital processes and media are affording new practices of production, consumption and reception of knowledge, while throwing new light on existing analog methods. The digital is extending our cognitive and sensual capabilities, allowing us to explore previously uncharted grounds, giving us tools to envision the past in different ways, and enabling large datasets to be processed, distributed, and engaged with interactively. During this process, critical appraisal of the archaeological-digital has been relatively limited. 
In this session we will evaluate the growing paradigm of digital archaeology from an ontological point of view, showcase the ways digital technologies are being applied in archaeological practice—in the field/lab/studio/classroom—in order to critically engage with the range of questions about past people and worlds into which digital media give us new insights and avenues of approach. We ask how digital media and technology are being applied, whether they are broadening access to the archaeological record and how they are shifting relationships between archaeologists, the archaeological record and the public. 
Papers should have a theory-based approach to digital archaeological methods and set the agenda for future investigation. They should discuss the ways digital archaeology is affecting, disrupting and/or enhancing archaeological fieldwork, public archaeology, education and the publication/dissemination of archaeological data. Of particular interest are papers that engage with creativity and making, digital post/transhumanism, query analog methods through digital media, and feminist, indigenous or queer digital archaeologies.
For the session we have determined to pre-circulate papers and have a more general discussion panel at the conference. This will provide us more time and space for truly grappling with the questions at the heart of the session.
We also expect to publish this session in the European Journal of Archaeology. To that end, the following timeline would be applicable
1 February: Let us know that you are interested + provide a title for your paper
15 February: Submit your paper abstract to the EAA
1 August: Precirculated papers due
5-8 September: EAA Meeting
10 January: Final draft of paper due

The Queer and the Digital: Critical making, praxis and play in digital archaeology

Gareth Beale & Paul Reilly’s session at TAG was filmed by Doug Rocks-MacQueen’s team of conference videographers, for which I am grateful. There are a host of great papers from that day from Jeremy Huggett, Paul Reilly & Stefan Gant, Rose Ferraby, Catriona Cooper, Nicole Smith, Tanya Freke, and more!

Watch all of those other presentations first, and then watch mine on queering digital archaeology:

Let me know how it is–I struggle to watch myself on video.

Recent Ramblings on Digital Archaeology

A quick update, I’ll be at TAG Southampton, presenting a paper:

Title: The Queer and the Digital: Critical making, praxis and play in digital archaeology

Abstract:

Visual archaeological depictions have long reified heteronormative representations of the past. Feminist critiques have destabilized the representation of people in the past (Berman 1999; Gifford-Gonzalez 1993; Moser 1992) and queer theory in archaeology has pushed this even further, finding “silences” in heteronormative depictions of families and activities (Dowson 2007) and identity and status in the past (Blackmore 2011). Though experimental visualization is increasingly available through the growing accessibility of creation and publication through digital tools, current depictions of archaeological practice and the past have remained largely static. People are largely absent from digital reconstructions of the past, and when they are present they are an afterthought. This is similar to depictions of current archaeological practice. There is a corresponding absence of discussion of digital tools for emancipatory practice in feminist and queer archaeologies (but see Joyce and Tringham 2007 and Morgan and Eve 2012). In this paper I discuss the potential for an expressive, queer digital archaeology that incorporates critical making, praxis and play.

And I have a new(ish) publication about the transition from analog to digital photography in archaeology:

Title: Analog to Digital: Transitions in Theory and Practice in Archaeological Photography at Çatalhöyük

Abstract: Archaeology and photography has a long, co-constructed history that has increasingly come under scrutiny as archaeologists negotiate the visual turn. Yet these investigations do not make use of existing qualitative and quantitative strategies developed by visual studies to understand representation in archaeological photographs. This article queries the large photographic archive created by ongoing work at the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey to consider the visual impact of changing photographic technologies and of a shifting theoretical focus in archaeology. While using content analysis and semiotic analysis to gain a better understanding of the visual record, these analyses also unexpectedly reveal power dynamics and other social factors present during archaeological investigation. Consequently, becoming conversant in visual analyses can contribute to developing more reflexive modes of representation in archaeology.

And I edited a volume of the SAA Archaeological Record about Video Gaming & Archaeology. Sadly some of the articles (including mine) were bumped to a future issue:

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Check them out and let me know what you think!

Analogue/Digital Archaeology Session at the EAA

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Join us at the European Association of Archaeologists meetings in Glasgow on Saturday, September 5th from 8:00 – 10:00 in Room 361 for our discussion panel:

Analogue/Digital: Productive Tensions in Materiality and Archaeology

Abstract: As we integrate digital workflows into every aspect of archaeological methodology, it is increasingly apparent that we are all digital archaeologists (Morgan and Eve 2012). Yet archaeology has a long, productive and unfinished history with “analogue” media. Illustration, photography, dioramas, casts, paper-based maps, diagrams, charts and artistic renderings have all been – and continue to be – used to interpret and present archaeology to specialist and general audiences. Walter Benjamin argued that reproductive media destroys the “aura” of traditional artistic media (1968), and it has since been argued (Bolter et al. 2006) that digital media perpetuates a permanent crisis of this aura. As the premiere scholars of materiality, archaeologists can contribute to discussions of the context of, continuities between, and technological changes to these media artefacts. In this session we ask, in what ways are we using the digital in constructive interplay with the analogue? What can digital affordances reveal about analogue methodologies, and vice versa? And how are we pushing beyond skeuomorphic archaeological recording and rethinking the possibilities of media artefacts overall? We aim here to prompt reflective debate about, and speculative design of, the future of analogue/digital experimentation.

We have a fantastic set of participants:

Colleen Morgan (University of York) – Analogue/Digital: Spectrum, Landscape, Minefield?
Laia Pujol-Tost (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) – Mixed exhibits. The best of both worlds? & Pixel vs pigment. The goal of Virtual Reality in Archaeology
Sian Jones (University of Manchester) & Stuart Jeffrey – Material/Digital Authenticity: Some thoughts on digital 3D models and their material counterparts
Christine Finn (FSA) – Field Work in the Cubicle, and Other Computer Histories,
Kostas Arvanitis (University of Manchester) – Material Objects and Digital Avatars
Sara Perry (University of York) – Redefining Media in Archaeology

As Sara wrote: are you investigating issues at the intersections of the physical and the ephemeral? Are you enrolling digital technologies into the production of tangible experiences, or alternatively, aiming to better understand the digital through tangible forms of interaction? Have you eschewed the digital in favour of analogue engagements in your archaeological/heritage work – or have you rethought the dimensions of one via experimentation with the other? How are you materialising digital practices? And how is our very conception of materiality being reconfigured (or not) by analogue/digital innovation?

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