Macroscopic approaches to archaeological histories: Insights into archaeological practice from digital methods

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

The history of archaeology, like most disciplines, is often presented as a sequence of influential individuals and a discussion of their greatest hits in the literature. Two problems with this traditional approach are that it sidelines the major of participants in the archaeological literature who are excluded from these discussions, and it does not capture the conversations outside of the canonical literature. Recently developed computationally intensive methods as well as creative uses of existing digital tools can address these problems by efficiently enabling quantitative analyses of large volumes of text and other digital objects, and enabling large scale analysis of non-traditional research products such as blogs, images and other media.