Big Archaeology: Horizons and Blindspots

ABSTRACT

Big data have arrived in archaeology, in the form of both large-scale datasets themselves and in the analytics and approaches of data science. Aerial data collected from satellite-, airborne- and UAV-mounted sensors have been particularly transformational, allowing us to capture more sites and features, over larger areas, at greater resolution, and in formerly inaccessible landscapes. However, these new means of collecting, processing, and visualizing datasets also present fresh challenges for archaeologists. What kinds of questions are these methods suited to answer, and where do they fall short? How do they articulate with the work of collecting smaller scale and lower resolution data? How are our relationships with “local” communities impacted by working at the scales of entire provinces, nation-states, and continents? This themed issue seeks to foster a conversation about how the unprecedented expansion of archaeological site detection, the globalization of archaeological data structures and databases, and the use of high-resolution aerial datasets are changing both the way archaeologists envision the past and the way we work in the present. In our introduction to the issue, presented here, we outline a series of conceptual and ethical issues posed by big data approaches in archaeology and provide an overview of how the nine essays that comprise this volume each address them.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• digital archaeology
• remote sensing
• lidar
• drones/UAVs
• vision
• archaeological theory
• archaeological ethics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the contributing authors to this special issue, the JFA editors, and three anonymous reviewers. We also thank Nichole Sheldrick, Rachel Opitz, Carl Demuth and Joshua Wells, who participated in the SAA session on which this collection is based. Parker VanValkenburgh would like to thank Carol Rojas Vega, Bethany Whitlock, Daniel Plekhov, Daiana Rivas-Tello, Ema Perea, Alexis Reategui, Sophie Reilly, Eliazar Tuesta, Mercelita Tuesta, Llony Cuipal, Alejandro Cuipal, Alcira Chavez, José la Torre, Lliner Tuesta, Jorge Traujo, Manuel Malaver, Jorge Chiguala, Jaime Jiménez, Luis Jaime Castillo, Kelly Pan, Vania Vera, Krizzia Soto Villanueva, Paul Abrams, Sam Wertheimer, Nicolas Trigoso, Dora Rubio, Victor Alvarez, and Gilberto Alvarez.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Parker VanValkenburgh (Ph.D. 2012, Harvard University) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, head of the Brown Digital Archaeology Library and an elected fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Among other research projects, he co-directs the Paisajes Arqueológicos de Chachapoyas project with Carol Rojas Vega and is and is co-editor, with Steven Wernke, of GeoPACHA: Geospatial Platform for Andean History, Culture, and Archaeology.

J. Andrew Dufton (Ph.D. 2017, Brown University) is a Lecturer in Roman Archaeology and History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. His research asks questions of how cities—ancient and modern—shape the daily experiences of their inhabitants, with a particular focus on the long-term dynamics of urban change in North Africa. He also has a longstanding commitment to the role of digital and spatial technologies in the collection, communication, and teaching of archaeological data.

ORCID

Parker VanValkenburgh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4289-6170

J. Andrew Dufton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0412-0582