We live in a digital age; a world where computers are omni-present, but in which we are only just beginning to understand how to productively apply them to our lives. In a very short period computers have come from being great number crunching machines to being 'neat' and 'nifty' gadgets, from being almost inaccessible to being everyday devices that we have come to rely upon-perhaps too much. Yet, despite the presence of computers in our offices, homes, cars, planes and, in fact almost every device in the modern world, we do not always know how to utilize them to their best advantage. This is certainly the case in the study of archaeology. To this end one can say that digital archaeology is not so much a specialism, nor a theoretical school, but an approach-a way of better utilizing computers based on an understanding of the strengths and limits of computers and information technology as a whole. This volume presents an overview of some of the more useful and innovative applications of computers to our understanding of the archaeological past. It shows good examples of how technology is being integrated into our approaches to theory, practice and indeed demonstrates how they are assisting in the marriage between the two.

Archaeology and the Media, 2007

2018

This monograph is dedicated to an area of knowledge that in the English-speaking and Central European, and increasingly in the Spanish-speaking world, has long been attracting great interest. We are referring to what is known as Media Archaeology, an area in which the clear and fertile resonance of the term with Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is evident, but which exceeds and extends the scope of the latter along other unprecedented paths, to explore its own becoming creation. Our interest, a priori, is not to defend a firm academic position, in a sense of pure praxis and conceptual comfort, but rather to collect a series of theoretical (and to a certain extent epistemological and methodological) approaches in a set of discourses and practices linked to the media deployed over time. Media Archaeology brings together common interests that have been developing for decades from various foci and authors, ranging from visual studies, cultural history and film studies, to medi...

The public’s fascination with archaeology has meant that archaeologists have had to deal with media more regularly than other scholarly disciplines. How archaeologists communicate their research to the public through the media and how the media view archaeologists has become an important feature in the contemporary world of academic and professional archaeologists. In this volume, a group of archaeologists, many with media backgrounds, address the wide range of questions in this intersection of fields. An array of media forms are included including television, film, photography, the popular press, art, video games, radio and digital media with a focus on the overriding question: what are the long-term implications of the increasing exposure through and reliance upon media forms for archaeology in the contemporary world. The volume should be of interest to archaeologists and those teaching public archaeology courses.

Arts et Sciences, 2019

Digital games have become considerable and influential cultural transmitters throughout the past years. As social sciences had grasped the importance of this medium as an object of study, the field of archaeology has increasingly taken notice of the digital leisure worlds of millions of players. Studying games as artefacts or archaeological sites have been therefore pioneering research programmes by scholars like Andrew Reinhard in order to test the boundaries of the archaeological framework, as also to generate important insight on our society by applying archaeological methodology on digital games. The aim of this paper is to discuss the possible role of archaeology in its conjunction with video games and tries to establish a critical perspective towards the enthusiastic first wave of the archaeology of video games.

"Journal of Contemporary Archaeology" vol. 5, no 2, 2018

In contemporary archaeology, we can identify a clash of two apparently antagonistic "paradigms": the "(re)turn to things" and the "digital turn". The latter has had great impact on archaeological museums, traditionally focused on material objects, and in this article I analyse this in terms of a phenomenon that I call "digital escapism". Digital escapism embraces ontological and epistemological questions that stem from the digital turn in archaeology - it might denote the dismissal of artefacts as subjects of scientific interest, or a shift in focus to digital methods as a means to creating an immersive past reality. It may also relate to big data in archaeology and the attempt to (re)connect this archaeology with science by way of informatics. My analysis of the exhibition presented in Rynek Underground, a museum in Krakow, provides a case study of digital escapism within museum space.

Slow archaeology situates contemporary, digital archaeological practice both in the historical tradition of the modern discipline of archaeology and within a discourse informed by calls for Taylorist efficiency. Rather than rejecting the use of digital tools, slow archaeology calls for archaeology to embrace a spirit of critical engagement with the rapidly changing technological landscape in the field. This contribution draws upon lessons from the popular "slow moment" and academic discussions of modernity and speed to consider the impact that the rapid adoption of digital tools has on archaeological practice and knowledge production. Slow archaeology pays particular attention to how digital tools fragment the process of archaeological documentation, potentially deskill fieldwork by relying on digital (Latourian) “blackbox” methods, and erode the sense of place so crucial to archaeological claims of provenience. The result of this critical attention to digital practices is neither a condemnation of new tools nor an unabashed celebration of their potential to transform the discipline, but a call to adopt new technologies and methods in a deliberate way that situates archaeological knowledge production in the realm of field practice.

Introduction to T. Clack and M. Brittain (eds) 2007. 'Archaeology and the Media'. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Archaeology is more prevalent in the media today than ever before. Likewise, the media is more prevalent in archaeology than has previously been experienced. Media is both the means to mass communication and the material agency by which that communication is transmitted, transferred, or conveyed. Different media have impacted upon archaeology in different ways, and a future relationship with the media lies in an uncertain balance with the emergence of the digital era of technology. What has archaeology’s relationship with the media looked like in the past, what are the issues at stake in this relationship today, and is archaeology suitably equipped for this partnership in a future of increasingly rapid information transfers?

Routledge, 1992

All things archaeological - from archaeological method, the connections between archaeology and modernity, through a process-relational paradigm, to the heritage industry and archaeology as a mode of cultural production, with an outline of archaeology as craft. Overall it is an exploration of the archaeological imagination, as I called it when I was at University Wales Lampeter, with archaeology a relationship between the remains of the past and present interests. I wrote this book while still making my way into archaeology - it brought together what I had been saying with Chris Tilley in the 1980s with a personal vision of what the archaeogical past means to many people now. The book takes risks with experimental writing and imaging, including eidetics and collage. Twenty five years after publication it is pleasing to see that much of what I was writing about then has come to figure significantly in archaeological thinking: — the book is a kind of analysis of the discourse of archaeology and exemplifies an interest in how the past may be mediated - written and visualized - imagery, simulation, narrative — the book argues for an extension of archaeological interest to include the contemporary world - archaeologies of the contemporary past, with a particular focus upon the convergence of archaeology and contemporary art — in this the book deals with archaeology's cultural associations with modernity - horror fiction to gardening, forensics to fakery — the cultural politics of archaeology are revealed through an ethnography of archaeology, archaeologists and those with archaeological interests the book argues for a new conception of heritage - not academic disdain for popular interest in the remains of the past, but a celebration of certain kinds of actuality that embody creative relationships with the past — rather than have archaeology only engaged in explaining and interpreting the past, the book argues for a post-interpretive turn to take us beyond epistemology into work upon the materiality of the past - ontologies of relationship between past and present — this means thinking about the materiality of cultural experience and its embodiment - a focus on experiences past and present in a process-relational paradigm related to a reading of Nietzsche, Bergson, Adorno's negative dialectics, and Deleuze's nomadics.