Slow Archaeology: Technology, Efficiency, and Archaeological Work

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WORKING DRAFT. DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION. 2015

Slow Archaeology: Technology, Efficiency, and Archaeological Work

William Caraher

University of North Dakota

Paper delivered at

Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: the Potential of Digital Archaeology

Boston, MA

27-28 February 2015

Introduction

The phase slow archaeology came to me while I was giving a paper last year at the University

of Massachusetts at a conference organized by Eric Poehler. On my flight from eastern North

Dakota to western Massachusetts, I had happened to read a paper on slow teaching, and had

ample time to think and reflect while my trip endured several travel delays brought on by an early

spring snow storm. My paper at UMass, which I think is available on my blog, considered the impact

of digital tools on archaeology as a craft. I appealed to recent observations on the deskilling of

academia, the long conflict between craft and industrial modes of production, and some anecdotalobservations about archaeological practice in the field. Since then, Ive co-edited a small volume on


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Rabinowitz, and carry them away from their physical contexts. In fact, recent advances in 3D

scanning has allowed us to reconstruct entire archaeological environments on our laptops and

mobile devices. My hope is that slow archaeology goes beyond just being a little more deliberate in

the field, to become a useful term to discuss the larger contexts for both our work as archaeologists

and the objects that we study.

Earlier versions of this paper have emphasized the profoundly modern character of archaeology

as a discipline. Archaeological practice over the past century has appealed to modern methods

ranging from the adoption of photography and standards of technical drawing, to the organization

of labor along industrial lines. Artifacts of craft persisted in the discipline, of course (as Latour

reminds us we have never been (fully) modern), but with the arrival of the New Archaeology of

the late 1960s and 1970s and the rapid adoption of computer applications in archaeology, the craft

elements in field practice have seen a steady decline.

The acceleration of the archaeological workflow tends to complement the increasing pace of

academic life. The drive to publish for tenure and promotion and policies in host countries that

limits the extent and duration of field work pushes us to work more quickly and to develop

efficiencies wherever possible. So the increase in pace over the past century may seem quite naturalembedded as it is in changing archaeological methods, technologies, and realities, but it nevertheless

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recording designed to improve accuracy, regularized description for later comparison, and to

facilitate computerized data entry. [SLIDE] Todays use of iPads or other tablet computers at trench

side or in the field reproduce the character and structure of paper forms and further streamline

archaeological documentation. I am currently working with the Western Argolid Regional Project,

and we relied on paper forms and afternoon data entry sessions to transcribe data from around 2400

survey units. This was a remarkable drag.

[SLIDE] In addition to neatly delineated recording forms and their digital versions, 3D

structure-from-motion photography offers a method to streamline trench and artifact illustration.

By breaking a trench into a series of individual photographs, we can use software like AgiSoft

photoscan to produce an accurate 3D model of the trench. On a day-to-day basis, it is possible to

use these methods to document individual strata in a trench or at least capture the spatial

arrangement of various important contexts at a much greater speed than traditional trench

illustration. At the end of an excavation season, when time always seems at a premium, my project

on Cyprus - the Pyla-KoutsopetriaArchaeological Project - was able to use structure-from-motion

images that reproduce overhead trench photographs without the inconvenience of erecting a

scaffolding or hiring a lift. The time saving possibilities and increases in efficiency are notable and

real.

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consider contexts as whole. Some of these opportunities for slow archaeology derive from time-

consuming processes like preparing trench plans, drawing scarps, or describing complex

stratigraphic or horizontal relationships on blank notebook pages. Other opportunities, however,

require intentionally pulling back from efficiencies to give archaeologists an opportunity to

understand space as a unified whole. For example, in the Western Argolid, we asked team leaders to

stop recording their detailed forms periodically throughout the day and to look across the landscape

to understand the larger context for their work. In excavation, the time to handwrite and to draw

not only slows down the work, but might also improve our ability to remember relationships. The

reasons for this are partly haptic: the act of writing and drawing has been shown to improve recall. It

is also partly to encourage excavators to discern important moments in the field by marking it with

different actions. In other words, moving away from the structure of forms and technical

requirements of proper recording creates a record that corresponds, in some ways, to the

difference between a technical and personal photograph. The former serves to reproduce an object

or situation faithfully, whereas the latter serves to reproduce a memory of an event.

Digital Ecosystem [SLIDE]

The fragmented, if more comprehensive, records created by digital practices in archaeologyalmost always require reassembly after the archaeologist leaves the field. To do this, archaeologists

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for photography exist, but these pieces of the process are different from the 3D models themselves.)

Moreover, as participants in this workshop realize as much as anyone, our ability to produce 3D

models has existed for quite some time, but they remains difficult to publish outside a few academic

publishers, and remain challenging to preserve in a reproducible way. These limitations do not

diminish their potential utility, but reveal one side-effect of fragmenting our archaeological data in

an effort to manipulate it in more efficient (and also more dynamic) ways. Without attention to the

larger digital and social ecosystem in which our data functions, we run the risk of decontextualizing

our archaeological processes.

Digital Space [SLIDE]

The final part of my paper picks up on the theme of the digital and social context of archaeology

and hopefully returns it to a more familiar debate at the center of traditional archaeological practice.

I want to appeal to arguments made for the relationship between time and space in a digital world.

So far Ive argued that digital methods are part of a larger trend to seek efficiency and speed by

parsing tasks more finely. These practices have gone a long way to solve the practical problems

associated with limits in time, funding, expertise, and workforce and reflects century-long trends in

industry, academia, and even archaeological methodologies. At the same time, the ways in which we

have implemented digital tools in archaeology has complicated our efforts to reconstructing the

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data collection, primarily, and the understanding of those data collected can take place not only at

another time, but frequently, in another place.

To do archaeology in our offices, we have become increasingly attached to digital surrogates of

archaeological artifacts. I use the term artifact quite broadly here to include both traditional artifacts,

like pot sherds, statue fragments, and architecture, and evidence for archaeological relationships, like

stratigraphy, soil descriptions, and other environmental data recorded over the course of an

excavation or survey. With the most recent advances in easy, cost effective, and efficient 3D

scanning as the organizers of this conference have helped to develop, it becomes possible to

transport a 3D model of an object back to home institutions on a laptop computer. Databases, scans

of notebooks, photographs, and other digital records enable archaeologists to reconstruct

archaeological contexts thousands of miles from the location of the physical object.

It seems that the higher the resolution of our documentation, the greater the boon to the

archaeologist. To be clear, like most people in this room, I have found myself in my office cursing

some overlooked or misremembered detail invisible in photographs, descriptions, and even 3D

models. These moments of cursing, however, never fails to remind me that the original context of

the object matters, or, to evoke a slightly different discourse, provenience has value. Looted objects

are less valuable to archaeologists because the act of looting has rendered them out of place.

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Lectures, site tours, and other kinds of outreach are becoming more and more common even at as

site as visually unremarkable as ours at Pyla-Koutsopetria. Like widely supported calls for repatriation,

something about archaeology remains unmistakably local.

Conclusion [SLIDE]

Slow archaeology is not meant to be a solution to a particular problem in contemporary

archaeology, but a point of departure for a more substantial critique of our digital future. To my

mind, the goals and practices of digital archaeology have often followed larger trends in

contemporary society that look to fragmenting processes and data to gain efficiency. This is

consistent with both the long-term modern trajectory of archaeology as discipline and responsive to

recent realities of both academia and field work.

At the same time, our quest for modern efficiencies has the byproduct of collapsing space as

much as time. The portable digital surrogates that our work produces recreate archaeological

contexts - of a sort - in our offices and provide the basis for our analyses. Even if we argue that

archaeological knowledge has always been portable in the pages of academic journals, monographs,

and technical drawings and illustrations, digital archaeology takes to another level our ability to

fragment archaeological experience and to use complex tools to assemble this experience in another

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Slow Archaeology:

Technology, Efficiency, and

Archaeological Work

William Caraher

University of North Dakota


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Slow Archaeology: Technology, Efficiency, and Archaeological Work

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