From Trench to Tablet: Field Recording, Interpreting, and Publishing in the Age of Digital Archaeology

Summary

Since the arrival of robust mobile tablet devices in 2010, archaeological documentation has increasingly become born-digital. The adoption of digital tools and practices has not gone unnoticed, with reactions ranging from enthusiastic acceptance to outright skepticism. Significantly, scholars are beginning to offer more critical and reflexive views of the issues surrounding the use of mobile devices in archaeological fieldwork, interpretation, and dissemination. The ability to disseminate digital data directly from connected devices to a global audience threatens to destabilize traditional standards of archaeological documentation practices, which, in part, used media to define the stages of knowledge production: handmade, paper documents defined the provisional character of field documentation, and the printed, bound, publication marked definitive results. Digital media blurs these distinctions by making trench side data indistinguishable from its final form. By drawing on examples from current archaeological publication schemes, this paper will show how new digital tools and techniques can highlight the potential for mobile computing in archaeology, but also demonstrate how these new methods will challenge and transform institutions that shape archaeological knowledge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeological Epistemology in the Digital Age

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16291