There is an active trade in human remains facilitated by social media sites. In this paper we ask: can machine learning detect visual signals in photographs indicating that the human remains depicted are for sale? Do such signals even exist? This paper describes an experiment in using Tensorflow and the Google Inception-v3 model against a corpus…[Read more]

The models and animations of the Old Minster, Winchester were remarkable in 1984–6 for producing the earliest animated tour of a virtual archaeological monument. Thought to be lost, thirty years on the original model files were rediscovered buried under layers of now unsupported code and recovered.

This paper describes how the models were i…[Read more]

Digital technology increasingly pervades all settings of archaeological practice and virtually every stage of knowledge production. Through the digital we create, develop, manage and share our disciplinary crown jewels. However, technology adoption and digital mediation has not been uniform across all settings or stages. This diversity might be…[Read more]

Mobilizing the Past is a collection of 20 articles that explore the use and impact of mobile digital technology in archaeological field practice. The detailed case studies present in this volume range from drones in the Andes to iPads at Pompeii, digital workflows in the American Southwest, and examples of how bespoke, DIY, and commercial software…[Read more]

An archaeological comic introducing ‘Sarsen Country’, the area of central-southern and eastern England where sarsen stones can be found and have been used by people since the Neolithic period. The poster is drawn and laid out in the style of a railway poster from the inter-war years. It takes the viewer on a journey around the country, calling in…[Read more]

In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how the Angolan refugees living in Zambia during the Angolan civil war used their divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. To many people, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of small articles drawn in…[Read more]

As cestas de adivinhação de Angola, da Zâmbia e da República Democrática do Congo tornaram-se mundialmente conhecidas pelo seu fascinante conteúdo: várias dezenas de peças imbuídas de simbolismo. Vidas em Jogo apresenta este simbolismo em acção. As cestas de adivinhação, transformadas em oráculos, são entendidas pelos seus utilizadores c…[Read more]

The statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia, Africa, do not fully agree. While researchers rightly stress the importance of observation, analysis and interpretation in basket divination, going so far as to describe diviners as scientists, they fail to recognize that…[Read more]

In this article, the author explores basket divination, a technique found in Zambia and neighboring countries, as a form of material religion. Mores specifically, the author shows that in basket divination the idea of objectivity (objective knowledge) is directly associated with the materiality of the oracle used for divining. In the Luvale…[Read more]

This chapter on witchcraft in northwest Zambia shows that forms of asking and giving may be deployed to suspend suspicion about the motives of others, even as they possess the potential to kill. When a woman asks a witch for a gift of salt to flavor her food, the witch feigns generosity but forces that woman to join the coven in recompense. In…[Read more]

Instead of asking what evil is, let us see where evil takes us. Based on many conversations on the topic of witchcraft in northwest Zambia, Africa—conversations in which witchcraft is presented from the perspective of the bewitched—the concept of evil takes us to a ghastly realm of destruction and transfiguration where the discourse of mor…[Read more]

Based on a case study, the paper analyses the possibilities of social media as a tool for science communication in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) usage in archaeology. Aside from discussing the characteristics of digital archaeology, the social networking sites (SNS) Twitter, Sketchfab, and ResearchGate are…[Read more]

There is a thriving trade, and collector community, around human remains that is facilitated by posts on new social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Etsy, and, until recently, eBay. In this article, we examine several thousand Instagram posts and perform some initial text analysis on the language and rhetoric of these posts to understand…[Read more]

For over a decade the Historic Land-Use Assessment Project, a partnership between Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, has undertaken the challenge of mapping the character of Scotland’s historic landscape. By 2015 the Project will have delivered 100% coverage and, for the first time, S…[Read more]

Social network analysis as a distinct field of study had its genesis in the anthropological
revolt against structural-functionalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was born through
an awareness among a new generation of scholars that structural- functional models failed
to make adequate space for human agency. Attention to personal…[Read more]

The growth of the city of Rome was dependent on its ability to exploit successfully the human and natural resources of its hinterland. Although this hinterland eventually extended to incorporate the entire Mediterranean seaboard, the resources of the Tiber valley originally nourished the city and continued to do so despite the growth in imports…[Read more]

Agent-based modeling presents the opportunity to study phenomena such as the emergence of territories from the perspective of individuals. We present a tool for growing networks of socially-connected settlement structures from distribution map data, using an agent based model authored in the Netlogo programming language, version 3.1.2. The…[Read more]

For historians, agent-based modeling (ABM) methodologies allow us to formalise our thinking about how the past worked and explore those assumptions in a way previously limited to thought-experiments. In ABM, numerous autonomous, heterogeneous agents are allowed to interact in a digital environment according to rules of behaviour directly drawn…[Read more]

An appendix to my MA thesis, ‘Satisfied with a Knowledge of the Totals: Labouring to Build the Claudian Aqueducts’, Reading, 1998. In this appendix, I tried to match Ashby’s descriptions of the remains of the aqueducts with Van Deman’s descriptions. From these descriptions, I crafted a volumetric model of the quantities of materials used in the…[Read more]

The Neolithic period is well known for its stone and earth monuments. However, the cropmark record and a small number of excavations demonstrate that monuments, in a variety of different forms, were also built of timber. Although timber monuments have been photographed from the air since aerial survey began in Scotland and, as a result, the…[Read more]