Archaeological Practices and Societal Challenges (original) (raw)

“Archaeological Practices and Societal Challenges”, Open Archaeology 8/1 (2022), pp. 296-305

Archaeology and archaeological work are tightly linked to contemporary societal challenges. Archaeology has much to contribute to the understanding, contextualising and working out of global challenges from migration to environmental change. In parallel to how archaeology impacts society, the society, societal changes, and challenges impact archaeology and its public mission of preserving and interpreting the physical and curating the informational archaeological record. Similarly, they impact archaeological practices, that is how archaeology is done in practice. This article draws attention to the need to comprehend what the increasing diversity and multiplicity of links between archaeological practices, knowledge work, and contemporary societal challenges implies for the understanding of how archaeology is achieved and archaeological knowledge is produced. The discussion is based on input collected from 50 members of the COST Action Archaeological Practices and Knowledge Work in the Digital Environment (www.arkwork.eu) who shared their views on how archaeology can contribute to solving contemporary societal challenges and what societal changes and challenges are likely to affect the field of archaeology during the next 5 years. In addition to a continuing need to increase the understanding of archaeological practices and their implications, distilling the outcomes of the state of the art into shared, validated, and actionable lessons learned applicable for societal benefit remains another major challenge.

Archaeological Practices, Knowledge Work and Digitalisation

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 practices and knowledge work in the digital environment (www.arkwork.eu), is to highlight the need for at least a relative consensus on the extents of archaeological practices in order to be able to understand and develop archaeological practices and knowledge work in the contemporary digital context. The text discusses approaches to study archaeological practices and knowledge work including Nicolini’s notions of zooming in and zooming out, and proposes that a distinction between archaeological and archaeology-related practices could provide a way to negotiate the ‘archaeologicality’ of diverse practices.

Curating Archaeological Knowledge in the Digital Continuum: from Practice to Infrastructure

Open Archaeology, 2016

I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled global digital infrastructures and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and meaning making, as a “grand challenge” for digital archaeology. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology, viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence, as exemplified in contemporary practices of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, in epistemological reflexivity and in pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity “from the field to the screen” in a variety of archaeological situations, I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive, epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods, and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. Its potential value is in helping establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agency-oriented and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology.

Whither Archaeologists? Continuing challenges to field practice.

Antiquity, 2019

Current archaeological practice in the UK and elsewhere focuses on the collection of empirical data. While scholars have proposed theoretical advances in field techniques, very few of these methods have been adopted in commercial archaeology. A combination of increased time pressure on development projects and the conservatism of the sector contribute to challenging times for archaeological practice. Additional complexity is introduced by large-scale infrastructure projects unsuited to standardised field techniques. This article explores these issues, calling for a flexible, consultative approach to project design and implementation, to ensure the longevity of both archaeology and the archaeological profession.

Theorising the Digital: A Call to Action for the Archaeological Community

Oceans of Data: Proceedings of the 44th Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, Mieko Matsumoto & Espen Uleberg, eds. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 11-22., 2018

Although archaeologists are increasingly critically engaged in their deployment of computational approaches, those who label themselves as ‘digital archaeologists’ are typically not recognised for their philosophical contributions to the discipline and are rarely positioned at the forefront of general disciplinary theorising. Indeed, where digital archaeology does feature in volumes on archaeological theory, it often amounts to little more than a footnote. This is in spite of the fact that digital archaeologists have been driving change in archaeology for more than a half-century now. Notwithstanding the support of major international organisations and widespread commitment to key social projects (e.g. open access, ‘slowness’, neoliberal critique, emancipation), digital archaeologists still do not seem to have the rubrics in place to force larger theoretical shifts in the discipline. We aim here, then, to begin identifying the gaps and tensions which hamper our capacities to write contemporary and future archaeological theory.