The hype surrounding the impending mainstreaming of Virtual Reality can seem to prioritize the digital above the critical. With the development of VR said to be at a pivotal point, there is an important opportunity to consider the emergence of virtual heritage and its potential futures. This paper argues that there is a disjunction between the…[Read more]

in L. Lawrence and M. Aguilar eds., Anthropology and Biblical Studies: Avenues of Approach. Leiden: Deo, 2004: 120-139.

A piece on the archaeology and social context for home in the 21st century Bakken oil patch.

Digital practices have increasingly come to influence discussions of archaeological work in the 21st century. As a result, many archaeologists use the concept of workflow to describe the relationship between the various phases of the knowledge making process from fieldwork to analysis, interpretation, research, and writing. This paper extends this…[Read more]

The availability and accessibility of digital data are increasingly significant in the creation of archaeological knowledge with, for example, multiple datasets being brought together to perform extensive analyses that would not otherwise be possible. However, this makes capturing the silences in those data—what is absent as well as present, w…[Read more]

This paper presents a grand challenge for Digital Archaeology of a different kind: it is not technical in and of itself, it does not seek out technological solutions for archaeological problems, it does not propose new digital tools or digital methodologies as such. Instead, it proposes a broader challenge, one which addresses the very stuff of…[Read more]

A keynote presentation at the 2012 Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA) conference in Southampton (UK) proposed the use of grand challenges as a vehicle for identifying and pursuing major advances in Digital Archaeology. At the same time, it was argued that this should be a collaborative venture. This was taken…[Read more]

Increasing access to open data raises challenges, amongst the most important of which is the need to understand the context of the data that are delivered to the screen. Data are situated, contingent, and incomplete: they have histories which relate to their origins, their purpose, and their modification. These histories have implications for the…[Read more]

Since the mid-1990s the development of online access to archaeological information has been revolutionary. Easy availability of data has changed the starting point for archaeological enquiry and the openness, quantity, range and scope of online digital data has long since passed a tipping point when online access became useful, even essential.…[Read more]

Defining what constitute archaeological practices is a prerequisite for understanding where and how archaeological and archaeologically relevant information and knowledge are made, what counts as archaeological information, and where the limits are situated. The aim of this position paper, developed as a part of the COST action Archaeological…[Read more]

This paper addresses the nature of digital scholarship and discusses the challenges for digitally engaged researchers in archaeology and elsewhere who find that the move to digital scholarship alters the terms of engagement in both the institutional and the personal context. For example, digital methods can counterintuitively lead to increased…[Read more]

Archaeological data is always incomplete, frequently unreliable, often replete with unknown unknowns,
but we nevertheless make the best of what we have and use it to build our theories and extrapolations
about past events. Is there any reason to think that digital data alter this already complicated
relationship with archaeological data? How…[Read more]