Big Archaeology: Horizons and Blindspots

Abstract

Big data have arrived in archaeology, in the form of both large-scale datasets themselves and in the analytics and approaches of data science. Aerial data collected from satellite-, airborne-and UAVmounted sensors have been particularly transformational, allowing us to capture more sites and features, over larger areas, at greater resolution, and in formerly inaccessible landscapes. However, these new means of collecting, processing, and visualizing datasets also present fresh challenges for archaeologists. What kinds of questions are these methods suited to answer, and where do they fall short? How do they articulate with the work of collecting smaller scale and lower resolution data? How are our relationships with "local" communities impacted by working at the scales of entire provinces, nation-states, and continents? This themed issue seeks to foster a conversation about how the unprecedented expansion of archaeological site detection, the globalization of archaeological data structures and databases, and the use of high-resolution aerial datasets are changing both the way archaeologists envision the past and the way we work in the present. In our introduction to the issue, presented here, we outline a series of conceptual and ethical issues posed by big data approaches in archaeology and provide an overview of how the nine essays that comprise this volume each address them.

Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle Acquired Lidar for Mapping Monumental Architecture

“…Many of these efforts have focused on detecting and extracting different types of features from bare-earth models (e.g., Casana 2014; Forest et al 2020; Howey et al 2016; Kokalj et al 2011; McCoy et al 2011; Sevara et al 2016; Quintus et al 2017). These new data, plus the tools to visualize them, changed the way we “see” the archaeological record (Huggett 2020; McCoy 2020a, 2020b; VanValkenburgh and Dufton 2020). In the next stages of the geospatial revolution in archaeology, we will need to find more ways to leverage our steady stream of different kinds of lidar data (McCoy 2017b), create more kinds of visualizations that are useful for archaeology, and carefully consider which remote-sensing techniques are appropriate for the goal of the project (Casana 2020).…”

Confronting the Present: Archaeology in 2019

“…Recently, a “third science revolution in archaeology” was declared “as part of a larger shift from postmodernity to a revised modernity” facilitated by technological advances in the biological and computer sciences (Kristiansen 2014, 23). This new modern archaeology includes the application of “Big Data” projects (e.g., Bevan 2015; McCoy 2017; VanValkenburgh and Dufton 2020), digital recording devices and software (e.g., Hill et al. 2019; McCuistion, Brown, and Harpole 2019), and digital heritage resources (e.g., Perry 2019; Watrall 2019); expanded remote‐sensing capabilities and crowdsourced data collection (e.g., Álvarez Larrain and McCall 2019; Luo et al.…”

Ethical considerations for remote sensing and open data in relation to the endangered archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project

“…Recently, a lot of attention has been focussed on ethics in relation to big data (e.g., Howey et al, 2020;VanValkenburg & Dufton, 2020), particularly for collecting and maintaining large datasets. Specific concerns have also been raised about how archaeologists collect, use, reproduce and store LiDAR data (Cohen et al, 2020;Fernandez-Diaz et al, 2018;Fernandez-Diaz & Cohen, 2020).…”