The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Digitizing Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological, heritage, and museum practice are increasingly inundated with the machineries and practices of digital technology, yet the costs and risks of these technologies remain outside disciplinary discourse. LiDAR drones survey stratigraphic materials; tablet-based tours provide educational tools and immersive museum experiences; augmented reality apps help tourists time-travel; photogrammetry and 3D printing provide new opportunities for reproducing unique objects; and online databases assist in collaborative data sharing. These practices have clear benefits for the field: they can help to protect in situ materials, optimize public-facing science communication, and provide redundancy for material culture at risk. However, these technologies also bring a host of potential problems; in this talk I will draw from the burgeoning interdisciplinary subfield of environmental media studies to introduce important critical lenses for the archeology's digital transition. In addition to life cycle issues of mining, manufacturing, and e-waste, I will address problems of energy dependency; dangers of obsolescence in digital preservation; and the larger philosophical and ethical challenges virtuality poses to the principles of materiality at the center of archaeology’s larger mandate. Such groundwork will provide crucial framing for potential case studies regarding online archives, site practices, and AR/VR reception studies for museum institutions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36877.0