digital archaeology (Other Keyword)
1-25 (389 Records)
Sustainable accessible data storage is as important to archaeologists as tractors are to farmers. In 2001 the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist, (OSA), was archiving 20GB of data on a 100GB server. Sixteen years later the office is serving 32TB on several server systems and plans are in place to archive 60TB over the next 4 years. In addition to space needs the office must also make this data in its many forms accessible to outside entities. In the not so distant past archaeologists...
3D Comparison of Attic Head Vases (2018)
Several hundred attic head vases are known worldwide and stored in museums and collections. In 1929, Beazley has categorized twenty groups based on stylistic properties and historic methodology. Head vases are assembled in several steps, most important for our comparison is the moulding of the head area. Since moulds were used to shape the heads, our initial hypothesis was to perform a quantitative comparison of head shapes based on digital scan data. Comparison of scan data is straight forward...
3D Models of Artifacts from the Lone Rock Stockade (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "I Know What You Did Last Summer: Student Contributions at Field Schools", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Starting in the late 19th century, the Tennessee State Penitentiary leased convicts for work in a private coal mine in Tracy City, Tennessee. Most laborers were black men who were either falsely convicted or arrested based on racially biased laws. Those incarcerated in Tracy City were part of a larger...
3D Skeletal Digitization as a Tool for Collaborative Artistic Commemoration (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Futures through a Virtual Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Facial approximation is a salient tool in archaeology that aims to estimate the likeness of past peoples based on historic, anatomical, and artistic evidence. This project used an iterative and community-oriented approach to 2D manual facial approximation for three decedents buried at Rupert’s Valley Burial Ground in St. Helena. Rupert’s...
Access to Information: The Case of Birch Island (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent archaeological project on Birch Island, Labrador, highlights questions of how digital data are used to gather and convey information to stakeholder communities, in particular, Indigenous groups with limited internet access in some remote locations. This paper questions if representing the...
Accuracy, Precision, and Efficiency: Comparing Mapping Techniques in Nixtun-Ch’ich’, Petén, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research in the Petén Lakes Region, Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New archaeological survey technologies have transformed the way in which sites are mapped. Nixtun-Ch’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala, has been surveyed in a variety of ways including a theodolite with an electronic distance measurement (EDM), total station, lidar, and photogrammetry. This paper aims to compare various mapping...
Adding Lasers to the Archaeological Toolkit: The Costs and Benefits of Terrestrial LiDAR in Digital Archaeology (2015)
In recent years, companies such as FARO and CyArk have begun incorporating 3D laser scanners into field-ready packages. Archaeologists have successfully employed these new 3D laser-scanning techniques to record sites such as Mount Rushmore and Merv in modern-day Turkmenistan. Despite the potential benefits of using this technology, which produces quickly scanned, high-resolution images of topography and features, several limitations have slowed it from entering the archaeologist’s standard...
ADS 3D Viewer: an example of open 3D real-time visualization system in archaeology (2015)
In this paper I will present ADS 3D Viewer, a project designed to develop a 3D real-time system for the management and analysis of archaeological data. The main aim of this interactive application is to give users the ability to access archaeological data to ground-truth interpretations. Thanks to the ADS 3D Viewer, in fact, multiple experts will share and analyse 3D replicas of the archaeological excavation record, which can be revisited and subject to new analytical techniques over the long...
Agelah and the Powershot: Digital Possibilities for Alternate Ways of Knowing in Archaeology (2017)
Digital recording methods offer a range of new means of collecting, organizing, and presenting archaeological information, which lead to new ways of thinking about the past. Capitalizing on the intuitive design of digital technologies additionally creates the potential for communities whose voices have been missing from the archaeological record to contribute their perspectives. In this paper, I draw upon my experiences experimenting with multimedia recording strategies at Petra, Jordan and at...
‘All things being equal’? Multiplex Material Networks of the Early Neolithic in the Near East (2018)
Archaeological network research typically relies on material culture similarities over space and time as a proxy for past social networks. In many cases, a range of different types of material culture are subsumed into reconstructed connections between nodes. However, not all forms of material culture are equal. Different types of objects may be caught up in rather different forms of social relationship – crudely put, ‘personal’ items such as jewellery may perhaps have more social and cultural...
Alternative Complexities in the Central Andes: An Anarchist Approach to Chancay Political Organization in the Huanangue Valley (2018)
Understanding the political organization of Late Intermediate Period (1000 – 1470 CE) societies along the central coast of Peru has remained challenging. The urban/proto-urban settlements that are characteristic of groups like the Chancay, Ichma, and the Chinca (among others) have been interpreted as material manifestations of elite power, however, many of these societies don’t fit traditional models of chiefdoms or states. Using a combination of ethnohistoric data, settlement pattern analysis,...
Always Halfway There: Keeping Up with Digital Archaeological Data in Virginia (2018)
Since being one of the first State Historic Preservation Offices to adopt electronic records management in the late ‘80s, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources has worked through several iterations of databases and web applications. These systems manage basic site information, details about physical collections, and now digital media and datasets themselves. Over time, the agency’s priorities and objectives surrounding digital records and data have evolved in ways common to other...
Analytical Models for At-Risk Heritage Conservation and 3D GIS (2018)
In the period 2011-2017, scholars from the University of California Merced and Cardiff University recorded the fragile earthen architecture of Çatalhöyük, Turkey employing cutting-edge conservation technologies to monitor the site and gather new data. Our goal was to model and analyze the site decay and plan conservation interventions. Tools and methods for this initiative include blending site monitoring data and digital documentation data from environmental data loggers, terrestrial laser...
Ancient Maya Sustainability at Caracol, Belize: Implications for Past and Future (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long-term archaeological research at Caracol, Belize has revealed a sizeable city with over 100,000 inhabitants at A.D. 650 that practiced intensive agriculture within its urban boundaries. Over 160 square kilometers of the landscape within Caracol was anthropogenic, having been rebuilt to both provide agricultural...
[AR]chaeology of El Presidio de San Francisco: Augmented Reality as a Public Interpretation Tool (2018)
Archaeologists have often eschewed technology as too expensive or superfluous for public outreach efforts. How can we as professionals overcome these long-held ideas and start to bring our projects into the digital age? This paper attempts to answer this question by examining how affordable cutting-edge technology can enhance public interpretation of archaeological resources. Augmented reality and 3D modeling were used in conjunction to visualize long-gone historical structures within the modern...
Archaeogaming and Shell Mounds (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeogaming is a new found topic in archaeological trends. The publication of the homonymous title by Andrew Reinhart, in 2019, seems to have swung ajar a door that lots of us have been carefully creeping into: the prospect of uniting archaeological theory, methods, and practice with the enjoyment of possible worlds. From that standpoint, we present some...
Archaeological and Digital Ethics as a Critical Component of Digital Literacy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While digital literacy typically refers to one’s ability to utilize and navigate various digital platforms, recent literature demonstrates a need to broaden our framing beyond the development of practical skills to include understanding the impact of those technologies in contemporary society. This is...
Archaeological Data Reuse in Action: Three FAIR Examples in tDAR (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The FAIR Principles for Data Stewardship asserts that data should be Findable, Accessible, and Reusable. Only by digitally preserving, efficiently curating, and ethically sharing data and information can we better understand the complex convergence of forces acting on humans and their societies across time and space. To this end, the Center for Digital...
Archaeological Exploration of Digital Spaces (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural processes extend into digital places and create archaeological sites that unfold in relationships between physical assemblages and assemblages that are not physical. Archaeological sites like these require that we translate our methods and extend our theory to understand behavior in the contemporary world. A distinction between two types of...
Archaeological Illustration and Imaging: Documentation of Pañamarca’s Archaeological Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Paisajes Arqueológicos de Pañamarca: Findings from the 2018–2023 Field Seasons" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades now, with the appearance of analogue photography, and more recently of digital technologies, a debate has arisen about the functionality, advantage/disadvantage between different archaeological recording techniques—considering that their main objective is to capture as accurately as possible the...
Archaeological Immersion and the Rhythmanalysis of Place: Experimental Virtual Reality Spatial Analysis at Jatanca (Je-1023), Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The phenomenon of place as it is rhythmically embodied, akin to a fabric that is collectively worn and interwoven over successive generations, unfolds at the center of our presentation. We explore the intricate meshwork of place-making, applying an...
Archaeological Legacy Data and Archaeological Data Legacies (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although digital repositories are well established, many researchers still use informal ways to share data, such as email. This type of sharing runs a great risk of information loss because data is often not well documented or formally described. One could argue, in fact, even new data is legacy data if...
Archaeological Storytelling: Narrative Construction using Virtual Reality (2018)
Virtual reality (VR) is an exciting new medium for interactive storytelling and holds great promise as a way to raise awareness of heritage sites and the conservation challenges they face. VR can also be used as a way to provide virtual access to parts of an archaeological site that may be too sensitive for traditional tourism activities. In 2017, CyArk developed three virtual reality experiences of geographically diverse archaeological sites around the world that are being adversely impacted by...
Archaeologists as Early Adopters and Critical Remediators at UC Berkeley’s MACTiA (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation, I revisit the digital training that was carried out by myself and colleagues at the UC Berkeley Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology (MACTiA). During the period of its existence (1998-2011) the program transformed itself enormously not only in response to...
The Archaeology of Mauritian Indentured Labor: Social Life and Death (2018)
This paper provides a comparative case study for archaeological studies of slavery and indenture. I investigate the 19th century landscape and material culture of indentured laborers on the Bras d'Eau sugar estate in northeastern Mauritius, Indian Ocean. After emancipation, indentured laborers lived and worked within the same physical plantation landscapes as the enslaved individuals who came before them. However, Asian indentured laborers in Mauritius were immigrants and migrants: one-third...