Tag: heritage

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:

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What is an Anarchist Heritage?

I recorded a short video for the wonderful people at the Anarchism Research Group on the topic of Heritage & Anarchism. They asked for under two minutes, so the video is the edited version, which you can watch below:

The full text before editing:

We commonly think of heritage as grandiloquent historic homes, arranged on green lawns– that statue of the general in front of the courthouse. If you are in the United Kingdom, “heritage” may invoke castles, Roman villas, or the name of a rather pernicious right-wing populist and conservative party. Or perhaps you think of UNESCO world heritage sites, places that are deemed of “Outstanding Universal Value” yet are often statist and reflect colonialist legacies.

These examples reflect what Laura-Jane Smith calls the authorised heritage discourse–“the regulation of historical and cultural narratives and the work that these narratives do in maintaining or negotiating certain societal values and hierarchies.” But moreso, as she further describes, it is “a process, or a performance, in which we identify the values, memories and cultural and social meanings that help us make sense of the present, our identities and sense of physical and social place.”

“Heritage” props up power, nation states and solidifies narratives about the past that are generally abhorrent to anarchists. It immediately evokes “god and country,” and privileges the powerful elite. Lewis Borck argues that archaeological sites are not just used to legitimise the state but, in his words, “create a future history where alternative power  structures—egalitarian, non-state, Indigenous, pre-colonial—seem impossible to achieve; or worse, are forgotten.”

So, with this context, what would an anarchist heritage look like? There is a growing recognition of past anarchist events, people, and interventions and acknowledging and understanding these can dispute statist claims of stability and the assumed ubiquity of top-down power structures. There may be anarchist approaches to heritage: curators, caretakers, conservators, archaeologists and museum workers could extend their ethics of care for places and artefacts to people and communities. Some already have. I’m thinking of the statue of Edward Colston, slave trader, conserved and on display in Bristol, graffiti and associated assemblage from his immersion in the Bristol Harbour in 2020 intact. I’m also thinking of the plinth, now a central point of gathering for protest, direct action, and collective expressions of happiness, grief and resistance. Further, Rachael Kiddey’s work with the unhoused and migrant communities provide a version of heritage work that centres marginalised people, not statues.

Finally, how can anarchism inform heritage practice? There is already a robust movement toward community-based initiatives within the sector–but what would it mean to open up heritage properties to communal use, occupation and curation by the public? To emphasise reuse, social justice and communal management over state preservation? And what is the place of the “heritage professional” in all of this? To offer solidarity, to resist governments that seek to silence, to mobilise heritage to collaborate and to serve.

An anarchist heritage may be difficult to conceptualise, let alone achieve. Anarchists live a politics that are always becoming–we pull up the paving to find the beach, we see that stately homes are built on what was once communal land, and we are suspicious of any narratives or heritage politics that result in building a statue to honour, well, anybody. If there is an anarchist heritage, it must be one we make ourselves, that doesn’t lionise people, affix or sanctify events, but that is mutable, imperfect, can be explored and shared and celebrated but also ignored or discarded as we see fit. Spanish civil war anarchist Durruti reminded us that “it is we the workers who built these palaces and cities” and that “we are not in the least afraid of ruins.” 

Borck L. 2019. Constructing the Future History: Prefiguration as Historical Epistemology and the Chronopolitics of Archaeology. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. 5(2):213–302

Smith L. 2012. Discourses of heritage : implications for archaeological community practice. Nuevo mundo mundos nuevos

Shooting Stock Photos for Archaeology & Heritage

This photo of Alexis has been used in millions of marketing things. Poor Alexis.

Occasionally one of my photos will surprise me. I’ve been uploading miscellaneous high-resolution photos online for over a decade, all licensed CC-BY, lots of archaeology and travel, and some even tagged with metadata. So they’ve been used all over the place to illustrate blog posts, travel websites, various and sundry. I’m a fairly rubbish photographer–well, the skill comes and goes as I go in and out of practice. I’d probably be even better if I could be bothered to photoshop my photos. I give them a couple of tweaks then release them online.

Screenshot of one of my photos used for the COST ARKWORK, with my blessing, obviously.

One of my admin roles in the lectureship is media creation for marketing the department. So a lot of my photos are used for various things, a prospectus, postcards, social media decoration. On weekends away with my family I inevitably drag them to a Local Heritage Attraction(tm), snap some photos and sometimes they’re reused as a nice background to a recruitment campaign, or textures in powerpoints. They’re mixed in with lots of photos of my kid…keeping a work/life media balance is a ship that’s long sailed.

I still use a funky old version of Lightroom.

I don’t find enough time to take photos, though it’s part of my role as a lecturer. It’s difficult to participate in events and have to photograph them at the same time. I had a fairly hilarious exchange with a condescending parent at the last graduation who asked if I was “just the photographer.” I was mostly annoyed at the diminishing of the role of photographer. I tell my students over and over, that old internet chestnut: “pix or it didn’t happen.” Anyway, the happy side effect of doing event photography and taking 100000 photos of my child is that I’m getting a little bit better at photographing people. Still not amazing though.

Finds hut.

I still take most photographs with my phone, which does a fair job for Instagram, but I dusted off the 50mm and took the Big Camera into town today to try to take a photograph for the Cultural Heritage Management MA. I wasn’t able to get the specific one I wanted as the light was bad, but I took a few others that may get used for one thing or another.

Holy Trinity is easily my fav church in York, even before I knew it was associated with Lister.

At the Holy Trinity.

It’s not a bad thing to ramble around York, taking photos and calling it “work.” It is, obviously, but it’s also work–it’s getting harder to see new and interesting angles in York. I just breeze by, headphones in, watching everyone else take photographs of the lovely city.

Is it ethical to use social media for teaching archaeology?

Taken in 2009.

In 2008 I wrote a fairly shiny, wide-eyed treatment of the use of Facebook in the classroom, arguing that it provided an opportunity to discuss online privacy and a unique way to engage with archaeology. I gave the option for students to create a fake profile for a 19th century resident Zeta Psi fraternity house, a subject of research for one of the classes, when one could still do such a thing. To wit:

A critical pedagogical engagement in archaeology offers the potential to serve as an emancipatory practice, in that dominant political and historical narratives are challenged with the material record, providing a way for students to examine these narratives within their specific historical context and provide their own interpretations (Conkey and Tringham 1996; Hamilakis 2004).

Social media was a great way to get students to translate taught material and research into a sphere that they are more familiar with and use it to query the historical and archaeological record. Great, fabulous…I wrote the short piece for a teaching prize, which I didn’t get. Oh well, add it to my failure CV ala Shawn Graham.

Fast-forward a decade and I receive a notification specifically calling for examples of innovative use of social media within the classroom. Always too early. Oh well. Anyway, I’ve used social media ever since to disseminate archaeological information in various ways, to an almost tedious extent. This autumn I taught a course called Communicating Archaeology wherein the students used blogs as a platform to host archaeological media that they created themselves. I don’t consider this to be radical in any way, just a convenient way to cohesively host content.

….except. Except that I’ve asked them to use WordPress. I quite like WordPress, perhaps obviously, but my (and my students’) content creation provides their bottom line. I can justify this to a certain extent with my own work in that it is a bit like (wince) academic publishing. Would I feel the same if WordPress was funded by adverts and posts actively helping to undermine elections, ala Facebook? Do I know that they are not?

Would I feel comfortable asking my students to perform their content on Facebook or Twitter these days? I’m not entirely sure. There has been some discussion regarding the ethics of use of social media amongst archaeologists, several of which are linked from my department’s webpage, but none of it engages with the fact that we are assigning students to create monetized content on for-profit platforms, OR that by making our students engage with these platforms they are getting their personal information harvested and re-sold. Never mind that, during an untold mental health crisis amongst our students, we are encouraging them to engage with media that actively makes users feel worse about themselves.

During my last lecture of Communicating Archaeology I emphasized to the students that on social media, the product is YOU. If you choose to engage with social media you may as well try to use it in a way that will benefit you, as those companies are profiting from your participation. For now the pedagogical balance may fall on a structured, critical engagement with social media, but any use in the classroom needs to fully consider the monetization of content and personal information provided.

The Lessons of Pokémon Go for Heritage

Pokémon Go at Stonehenge (re: Stu Eve)
Pokémon Go at Stonehenge (re: Stu Eve)

I have to admit, I was mostly ignoring the emergence of Pokémon Go, as I have probably the most gorgeous baby girl in the world to attend to these days. But after my favorite co-conspirator Stu Eve wrote a rather grumpy piece about augmented reality and Pokémon Go, I couldn’t resist.

Stu and I are basically the Statler and Waldorf of digital archaeology.
Stu and I are basically the Statler and Waldorf of digital archaeology. Especially if you don’t cite us.

Stu implores people to go outside, to use augmented reality to enhance and enchant heritage sites or even to ditch technology altogether and preserve and observe the wildlife that is already there instead of cartoon creatures. Stu then goes on to demonstrate that Pokémon Go distracts from heritage, citing a girl on Twitter catching a Pokémon at Stonehenge.

I contend that people playing Pokémon Go at heritage sites are simply extending their performance of identity on social media. It is not enough now to have an Instgram-filtered photo of you and your bestie at Stonehenge. There is a rather interesting one-upmanship in the attempt to capture unique content in the digital visual morass. When everyone has a photograph of Stonehenge, how can yours be the most unique, the most quirky or authentic performance of self in respect to the backdrop?

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK
Stonehenge, Wiltshire, UK

An interesting example–in the Volte Face series of photographs, Oliver Curtis deliberately turns away from the heritage focal point to capture the reverse view. This is provocative and compelling in its simplicity; the photographs reveal a blind side, a kind of back-stage for heritage at the same time as anthropomorphizing the heritage site–this is what the heritage “sees.”

Adding a Pokémon Go overlay adds a new element of interest, an unexpected juxtaposition of cartoon characters in a solemn (potentially boring) place. I, for one, welcome the Charizard on top of the Vatican–though I certainly share Stu’s concern for the complete monetization of experience.

The first lesson from Pokémon Go for archaeologists and heritage managers is that people are looking for novel, collective ways to experience and perform heritage. I think it is particularly important to note that Pokémon Go is obviously not a bespoke heritage application. It corresponds with my digital archaeological practice in that instead of attempting to build wholly new heritage-based applications and such, I try to use what people are already using as a form of interventionism, or even, at a stretch, détournement.

Memory maps at the San Francisco Presidio, 2008.
Flickr memory maps for geolocative interpretation at the San Francisco Presidio, 2008.

It is a hacky approach and everything breaks all the time–though bespoke heritage applications might actually have a worse track record–but surprising people by putting archaeology where they are not expecting it is its own reward. Be reactive, try to place archaeology in unexpected places, and don’t be too surprised when it blows up or it is ignored and it slowly fades away.

Perhaps the second lesson from Pokémon Go is that there is a corresponding retreat from digital media in archaeology from some of the most forward thinking digital archaeologists. It may be that the next challenge is to create interpretation so compelling, or so self-actualized that they put aside their phones and completely immerse themselves in experiencing heritage sites. Right? Devil’s advocate though–even if we managed such a monumental post-digital interpretive experience, we’d have to take photos of people engaged with it for the eventual publication. After all, pics or it didn’t happen.

 

 

Heritage Jam 2015!

The University of York Archaeology Department is hosting the Heritage Jam on 25 September at the King’s Manor. Last year we hacked cemeteries, and this year it will be Museums & Collections.

You can see why I’m usually behind the camera. Tara & Paul did a great job with it, but I can’t actually watch this whole video without running screaming out the room.

Photo by Dun Deagh
Photo of a doorway at King’s Manor by Dun Deagh

BONUS: If you participate in the Heritage Jam, you have the option of sleeping over at the King’s Manor, a fantastic Grade I listed building.

There’s a huge amount of information available on the website, sign up before it is too late:

http://www.heritagejam.org/

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Palmyra: A Lamentation

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I could write about the strange aesthetics of annihilation, iconoclasm, nationalism, symbolism, weaponized cultural heritage and the murder of people, a place, an archaeologist. I am supposed to be an expert in this, after all. Intimate of the ancient.

Or, on a more personal level–how Palmyra blushed toward the blue desert sky. How I was ragged sick so I didn’t take very many photos, but dragged around the site anyway, sitting in the shade of columns. Picking out details. Petting the friendly cats in the ruins. Now every time I hear about something else being destroyed I go back over the same photos. How it was the same when I found out about the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo, the Al-Madina Souq, Crac de Chevalier, Bosra, the Dead Cities–a UNESCO listing is a death sentence. These are only the big, well-known sites, there is extensive looting, destroying sites beyond all recovery.

It is easy to be glib (oh, now we can get to everything underneath! they were recorded anyway!) or post-modern (it’s only my white, western, colonialist/orientalist thinking that makes me care about old stacked stones), or relativistic (concrete houses & Greco-roman art, it’s all the same) and I’ve struggled through and re-written these scant 267 words. Yes, I care about people, I care about places, I care about things.

But I’m supposed to be an expert in caring about heritage and I still can’t find any fucking words. (though these help tremendously)

So I have my photos. And I give what I can when I can. And wait to study the new ruins caused by murderous men.

The Happy Accidents of Archaeological Drone Photography

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Admittedly, 80% of the 227 photos are of grass. Blurry, impressionistic, green. The camera was set to time lapse, taking a photo every five seconds, and most people in the Heritage & Play group had a turn. A new person at the controls, and the angry-bee-buzz of the small white drone would signal lift-off.

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We all stood around it, watching it aloft, buzz around, then land. We were amateurs–this is not an effective group shot, but it’s lovely. It’s late autumn in England, the sun hangs low in the sky, prolonging the golden hour and lighting up the still-green fields.

DCIM100GOPRO But who is the author of the photo? It was a time lapse, so was it Neil, who set the camera? Or the “pilot” of the drone? The wind played havoc with the camera gimbal, so the drone propellers show up in some of these photos, like fingers left too close to the lens.

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These are the rejected shots, the extra-archival material that I’m always interested in, the visual archaeological marginalia. Drones, tied to vicious, out-of-the-blue attacks on non-combatants by the United States, are tools of surveillance, of state-crafted terror, and take lovely photos of archaeology in the English countryside. We were happy the rain lifted so we could take better photos; in Pakistan a little boy lamented the death of his 67-year-old grandmother who was killed by a drone strike while picking vegetables, “I no longer love blue skies…In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”

Even unarmed, the drones are used for “weaponized photography“–there are a host of rules about where and when and why you can fly drones in the UK. Perhaps that’s why I find delight in these marginal, miscellaneous photos–they are goofy, non-standard and non-threatening, revealing an imperfect technological surrogacy. They’re accidentally lovely.

Three Functions

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“The aesthetic function of public art is to codify social distinctions as natural ones.”

(newspaper rock in Canyonland, Utah, by Molas)

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“The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property.”

(Outside Cheapo Records, Austin, TX)

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“The social function of public art is to subject us to civic behaviour.”

(Angkor Wat, by David Willmot)

From the Three Functions by Hewitt and Jordan.

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