Digital Archeology Is Here (and Has Been for a While)

Abstract

I want to stop talking about digital archeology. I want to continue doing archeology digitally. This is what Frontiers in Digital Archaeology is about. I echo (Morgan and Eve, 2012; p. 523) the statement that “we are all digital archaeologists.” This statement wants to be radical but is in fact a mundane recognition of a state of normality that has existed for at least 20 years and has described a significant segment of the archeological community for at least 40 years. Evidence of the reality of digital archeology is all around us in the discipline’s data collection and curation (Roosevelt et al., 2015), analysis [mainly through GIS, see Conolly and Lake (2006)], visualization [work in and elaborating on Stanco et al. (2011), among others], public outreach and participation (Richardson, 2013), and training methods. The reflection on what it means to be a digital archeologist is ongoing [Evans and Daly (2006) and work that builds on it]. Perhaps, the best evidence is the growing prominence of archeology blogs in driving the dissemination and interpretation of results (see Colleen Morgan’s middlesavagery or John Hawks’ weblog for notable examples in very different regions of the discipline). In this first editorial, I would like to lay the groundwork for the journal as a place primarily to do archeology digitally, rather than as a place to discuss digital archeology. In the social sciences and humanities, we have an unfortunate tendency to make approaches and tools into objects of study (literally, we essentialize them) and to organize the conversation around them. There are meaningful and even heavy conversations about the implications in other fields of the use of new digital tools. We will have those conversations in this journal. But those conversations in other fields have tended to facilitate rather than impede the setting up of things, such as Genbank1 and arXiv.2 Those conversations have been immensely productive, but they have been more focused and results oriented than I feel they have been so far in archeology. I must admit that I am a bit embarrassed at the public expense involved in the numerous rather sterile meetings in which I have participated about the digital turn in archeology and the setting up of public archives, community GIS, etc., for what so far I consider very little result. The carbon footprint of some of these meetings must have been stupendous. All the right people were at the table (I mean that sincerely), all the right things were said, all the right anxieties were aired out, and all the right authorities were cited. But I do not think the expense so far has been justified by the outcomes.