Archaeological Epistemology in the Digital Age

Digital technologies are becoming integral to archaeological practice, from research to pedagogy and public outreach. In the past decade, many archaeologists have reflected on how these technologies impact their work in the field and in the classroom, but they largely focus on how they developed, implemented, or improved digital tools or techniques designed to organize, analyze, and disseminate data. Yet as digital technologies become increasingly essential to how archaeologists investigate the past, we must also consider how they create new ways of engaging with, interpreting, and classifying materials, things, sites, and regions. For example, how do—or could—digital databases alter our understanding of relationships between and inextricable assemblages of humans, organisms, things, soils, and environments? Must the digital data we create themselves become artifacts of an archaeological record imagined as a collection of static entities? Or can the digital data add a new dimension to our understanding of the archaeological record as a dynamic process made up of sequences of entrained elements? How do digital tools change the way we "assemble" constellations of artifacts and practices, and consequently, reconstruct the past? This session addresses these questions of archaeological epistemology in the digital age.