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Workshop: Archaeological Data Management and Archiving

Archaeology is in a special position with respect to archiving because archaeological fieldwork, which creates archaeological data, also destroys the primary in situ archaeological evidence itself. Increasingly, the digital record may be the only source of information about archaeological research materials. It is essential, therefore, that the digital records that describe archaeological resources be made accessible and that their preservation be ensured. Continue reading →

Joining the Dots with Pelagios 3

The Pelagios 3 project is a community-driven initiative led by the University of Southampton that is annotating, linking and indexing place references in documents that use written or visual representation to describe geographic space prior to the European discovery of the Americas in 1492. They include ancient and medieval geographic descriptions (geographiae and chorographiae and itineraries) world maps (mappaemundi) and portolan charts. Continue reading →

Multisensory Experience

In recent years, archaeology has embraced phenomenological techniques and approaches to begin moving towards a lived experience of the past and embracing personalised perspectives. These avenues of archaeological investigation have been particularly popular within digital technologies, where computing methods provide a medium to create highly realistic images, graphics and video. Recent debate, however, has seen criticism of these methods as being overly ocularcentric. Continue reading →

Learning to Share: Has the rise of social media changed the way we think about sharing our research data?

Today, we routinely share information about ourselves and our work in ways that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. The rise of the Web, and in particular social media, has not only altered how we share information, but the whole ethos of what we share and why. The current debate in publication over open access, and requirements for the archiving of data by funders, is further shifting the question of whether to share our data from 'Why should I?' to 'Why haven't you?'. Continue reading →

Modelling Complexity

Complexity has became a new paradigm in hard sciences in the 90s and since then it has been slowly dripping into the social sciences and humanities. It works on the premise that many systems are complex in structure, i.e. their numerous individual parts interact with each other in a non-linear way producing phenomena which cannot be easily predicted solely on the basis of their characteristics. Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Villages: How Food Exchange Led to Aggregation in the American Southwest

In this talk I use computer simulation to explore the extent to which food-sharing practices would have been instrumental for the survival of Ancestral Pueblo people across the patchy landscape of the Prehispanic American Southwest. Social networks would have created stable bonds among these exchanging individuals, further helping the survival of those individuals and their progeny. Continue reading →

Multi-model inference, visual affordance, and point process analysis of a Bronze Age settlement on Leskernick Hill

Information criterion is a robust and flexible inferential framework that offers an alternative to the traditional hypothesis testing approach adopted by most archaeologists. Rather than testing the empirical record against a pre-defined null model, information criteria provides a statistical tool to compare alternative models and suggest whether one of them is better than the others. Continue reading →

How to make

How does material or information pass through the generations? As affect, as engram, as copy: mediated by the technologies of its reproduction. The re-use of objects, of commodities within art has a rich lineage of traditions, assemblage, bricolage, ready-made, collage and recently circuit bending, the creative short-circuiting of electronic gadgets. This repurposing of obsolescence has also become a tool of Media Archaeology, a ‘methodology for lost ideas’. J. Continue reading →