It must be right, GIS told me so! Questioning the infallibility of GIS as a methodological tool

Burg, Marieka Brouwer

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2017.05.010

Cited by 28 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…However, even GIS is open to the charge of being press-ganged into the uncomfortable service of archaeologists (Jensen 2017;Brouwer Burg 2017). A sustained example of this critique is that of Llobera:…”

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confidence: 99%

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Huggett

Reilly

Lock

2018

Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

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IntroductionThis position paper concerns the direction of computer applications and the digital more generally within the discipline of archaeology, and the manner in which they are adopted and then affect our practices. Digital technologies are integral to many facets of current practice in archaeology. However, there is little evidence of disciplinary-wide coordinated programmes but clear indications of haphazard application adoption, fractures, and silos. The objective here is to develop a framework within which meaningful progress can be made towards a common strategic goal with regards to how we adopt technology and create, develop, manage and share our disciplinary knowledge, competencies and capabilities in the age of the digital.Strategic thinking necessitates negotiation with the future, a task fraught with risk. We can think of probable futures in which we extrapolate some existing trend, such as the adoption rate of a specific technology, or envisage the next generation of technology coming over the horizon (Burton & Barnes 2017). However, there are generally several possible, very plausible, alternative futures, in which case we may think in terms of a collectively preferred future and set a strategy which seeks to favour that outcome. In the real world such predictions can be completely undermined by a wildcard event, something thought so improbable, or even undreamt of, but having a massive positive or negative impact. External factors such as economic instability, political change, and technical disruption can have profound repercussions for the practice of archaeology: our disciplinary structures, principles and norms, and how our collective knowledge, competencies and capabilities are deployed, developed, and maintained or lost. This paper seeks to lay the groundwork for an executable disciplinary knowledge strategy that is both flexible and robust enough to withstand constant disruption as we move forward into an unstable, erratic, and uncertain future. Contextualising the PresentIn seeking to ground any observations about future developments in digital archaeology, it becomes apparent that present perspectives of digital archaeologists fall somewhere between two extremes. At one end, there is a broadly utopian view of digital archaeology as a transformative development, epitomised by Djindjian's "ineluctable success" (2015), whereas on the other there is a more dystopian perspective that recognises the transformative aspect but questions whether archaeologists had much to do with it (e.g. Scollar 1999). Others prefer not to predict whether the impact will be positive or negative, but note they will undoubtedly have profound impact on practice and theory (Ucko 1992). Digital technology increasingly pervades all settings of archaeological practice and virtually every stage of knowledge production. Through the digital we create, develop, manage and share our disciplinary crown jewels. However, technology adoption and digital mediation has not been uniform across all settings or stages. This diver...

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confidence: 99%

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Huggett

Reilly

Lock

2018

Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

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“…Following this argumentation, we must also mention the increasingly serious methodological issues associated with the phenomenon of 'big data,' which some have referred to as the "massification" of archaeological data collected primarily through ever more efficient and affordable remote sensing techniques (McCoy 2017, 2020; VanValkenburg and Dufton 2020: S5). Of course, more data does not directly or necessarily lead to better data or more thorough understandings of the past, which we have previously commented upon (Brouwer Burg 2017). In fact, despite the apparent benefits of more data, archaeologists are now saddled with the additional and time-consuming task of mining massive data sets for useful points of information, suitable to a project's research goals and within computing capabilities.…”

Section: Part 1 Scaling Up: How Gis Can Expand Our Perspective On DImentioning

confidence: 99%

Unbinding Diversity Measures in Archaeology Using GIS

Burg

Howey

2020

Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

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Thirty years ago, a seminal volume drew together leaders in the field who were working on quantifying diversity in archaeological assemblages, Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology (Leonard and Jones, eds. 1989). While several papers identified space as a critical factor in structuring diversity, this concept was largely unaddressed and the analyses presented remained intrasite in scope. This was certainly due, in part, to the analytic and conceptual limitations of spatial analysis in archaeology in the late 1980s. Quantifying Diversity in Archaeology came out just before the geospatial revolution hit full swing in the field and the capabilities of today's geospatial technologies were unimaginable at the time. Now, thirty years later, the desire to analyze diversity across multiple sites from entire regions is easy to realize computationally. Nevertheless, key challenges identified in the original volume about quantifying diversity persist. While one can measure variation to identify diversity, we still need to understand what that means and how the categories we use to compute diversity are related to actual variation in past behavior(s) of interest. We explore various geospatial approaches that can help untether diversity analyses from traditional site-based frameworks. We argue that centering the experiences of the people producing and, importantly, perceiving the variation extant in their landscape is essential, as these personal experiences structured the past diversity we aim to study.

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“…GIS techniques have for some time now been a familiar part of archaeological projects, but archaeologists have not always been as quick to think deeply about why and how we use them. In 2017, an encouraging number of publications asked critical questions about the strengths and weaknesses in how GIS has been deployed and what we can do to improve their use (Brouwer Burg ; Earley‐Spadoni ; Gillings ; Gupta and Devillers ; Howey and Brouwer Burg ; E. Jones 2017; Kosiba and Hunter ; Lock and Pouncett ; Whitley ).…”

Section: Grappling With the Digitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding Archaeology in 2017: What Is Archaeology and Why Are We Doing It? Why Should We Be Doing It?

Lewis

2018

American Anthropologist

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These annual review essays focus on what we as archaeologists are doing year by year. Many themes continue on from review to review, waxing and waning, not unlike the bell curves of a traditional pottery seriation.Each year, themes are highlighted and presented in varied ways according to the orientation and aims of the reviewer. All do a masterful job of curating the vast range of what archaeologists were, in each annual period, currently producing. My review follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, summarizing an array of new and exciting research, and describing how agendas presented in 2017 cluster around sets of related questions and aims. It will also look at the growing literature that asks, in one way or another, fundamental questions about what archaeology really is and why we pursue it. In this time when the value of academic pursuits and scientific perspectives are being highly scrutinized in politics and popular culture, archaeologists are faced with the uncomfortable question of "What is it, really, that we should be doing?" [archaeology, current issues, public archaeology, digital archaeology] RESUMEN Estos ensayos de revisión anual se enfocan en lo que como arqueólogos estamos haciendo año tras año. Muchos temas continúan de revisión en revisión, creciendo o menguando, no muy diferente de las curvas en forma de campana de la seriación de la cerámica tradicional. Cada año, temas son enfatizados y presentados de varias maneras de acuerdo a la orientación y metas del crítico. Todos hacen un trabajo magistral de organizar un rango vasto de lo que los arqueólogos estaban, en cada período anual, realmente produciendo. Mi revisión sigue los pasos de sus predecesores, resumiendo una colección de nueva y emocionante investigación, y describiendo cómo las agendas presentadas en el 2017 se agrupan alrededor de juegos de cuestiones y metas relacionadas.También examina la creciente literatura que pregunta, de una manera u otra, cuestiones fundamentales acerca de lo que la arqueología realmente es y por qué nos dedicamos a ella. En este tiempo cuando el valor de los empeños académicos y las perspectivas científicas están siendo altamente escrutados en política y cultura popular, los arqueólogos se enfrentan a la pregunta incomoda de "¿Qué es lo que realmente deberíamos estar haciendo?"[arqueología, cuestiones actuales, arqueología pública, arqueología digital] ARCHAEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTATION?While the theme of what such a diverse discipline should be subtly undergirds much of the literature, a number of 2017 articles, each in a very different way, directly address the very nature of what archaeology is and why we practice it. In the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Assaf Nativ (2017, 55) asks us to reconsider our notions of the

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It must be right, GIS told me so! Questioning the infallibility of GIS as a methodological tool

Cited by 28 publications

References 6 publications

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Whither Digital Archaeological Knowledge? The Challenge of Unstable Futures

Unbinding Diversity Measures in Archaeology Using GIS

Finding Archaeology in 2017: What Is Archaeology and Why Are We Doing It? Why Should We Be Doing It?

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