Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeological Vision in the Age of Big Data," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Within the emerging domain of "big archaeology," the mass identification of sites in satellite imagery, extensive multi-sensor aerial surveys, and 3D data capture of finds, buildings, and landscapes all promise to extend the scale of archaeological analyses. However, these new means of collecting, processing, and visualizing data also raise fresh conceptual and ethical challenges. What kinds of questions are these methods properly suited to answer, and where do they fall short? Do we necessarily see archaeological objects, sites, and/or landscapes more clearly when we have more data to describe them? How are our relationships with "local" communities transformed by working at the scales of entire provinces, nation-states, and continents? This symposium brings together scholars who are actively engaged in assembling and analyzing extensive archaeological datasets to foster a critical conversation about how the massification of archaeological site detection and high-resolution imaging is transforming both the way we envision the past and the way we work in the present.