Thinking Socially: Digital Archaeology Beyond Technological Fetishism

Author(s): Lorna-Jane Richardson

Year: 2017

Summary

As research momentum gathers alongside the adoption of digital technologies into everyday life, the terms ‘virtual reality’, ‘online’, and ‘cyberspace’, increasingly fail to recognize the degree to which the adoption of digital technologies, and the material objects through which the digital is accessed, have been domesticated and made normal. The entanglement of social communication networks in the variety of digital environments provided by archaeological organisations is often seen as peripheral to digital archaeology, which is absorbed in technical applications and data analysis, or simple, ephemeral communications, in the case of social media. The social contexts, platforms and technologies involved in digital archaeology have, on the whole, been under explored and under critiqued, and has, as Huggett argues, ‘left archaeologists open to accusations of technological fetishism’ (Huggett 2015, 87). This paper will attempt to address these concerns by re-asserting the relevance of sociological theory to the contemporary human condition, and anticipate future social and technological trajectories, which may impact our practice.

Cite this Record

Thinking Socially: Digital Archaeology Beyond Technological Fetishism. Lorna-Jane Richardson. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver, British Columbia. 2017 ( tDAR id: 431584)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
Europe

Spatial Coverage

min long: -11.074; min lat: 37.44 ; max long: 50.098; max lat: 70.845 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15069