A Chimera Spider at Play: Making, Creativity and Collaboration in Digital Archaeology

Summary

In an interview with Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore, Ruth Tringham describes her experiments with digital remediations of the past as "expressing and sharing the complex web of relationships and ambiguities that is an essential dimension of the feminist practice of archaeology" (Rathje et. al 2013). As such, Tringham’s practice of digital making was an explicitly political expression of archaeological investigation, not as explanation, but as an interpretive process. She shared the excitement and engagement of creating archaeological narratives through New Media with her students, teaching digital media expression as a legitimate form of academic enterprise that can yield a "playful surprise." Tringham’s digital remediations, founded on archaeological evidence, explored a vast array of media--photography, videography, hypertext, virtual reality, augmented reality, gaming, and database narratives, to name a few--bringing an unheralded creativity and irreverence to archaeological interpretation. In this presentation I engage with Tringham’s contributions to archaeology with particular attention to critical making and play as political, productive methods for thinking about and with the past.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Lithics Cowgirl, Household Archaeologist, Digital Doyenne: A Session Dedicated to Ruth Tringham

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