Working Draft. August 17, 2015. Do not cite without authors permission.

Slow Archaeology: Technology, Efficiency, and Archaeological Work

The idea slow archaeology came from an experience. Last year, I presented a paper at the
University of Massachusetts for a conference organized by Eric Poehler. On my flight from eastern
North Dakota to western Massachusetts, I read a paper on slow teaching (Shaw, Russell, and Cole
2013) passed on to me from a colleague (Kelsch 2013), and had ample time to think and reflect
while my trip endured several travel delays brought on by an early spring snow storm. My paper at
UMass considered the impact of digital tools on field archaeology as a craft. I appealed to recent
observations on the deskilling of academia (Herzfeld 2007), the long conflict between craft and
industrial modes of production (Thompson 1963), and some anecdotal observations about
archaeological practice in the field (Edgeworth 2006; Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos 2009). Since
then, Ive co-edited a small volume on the international slow movement that included a small
reflective essay on slow archaeology (Caraher 2013; Caraher and Rozelle-Stone 2013).
This paper drew inspiration from the global slow movement which began as an Italian
response to the globalization of fast food (Petrini 2003), but tapped into a broader philosophical
debate about the pace of life in the modern world (e.g. Virilio 1977 [1986]). Since then, the idea of
slow has expanded into many areas of life as a form of bourgeois resistance to the pressures and
pace of post-industrial society (e.g. Honor 2004). While the lose cluster of ideas that make up the
slow movement are not beyond valid and important criticism, they represent a popular expression
of growing anxiety around technology, connectivity, and the social changes that attend the continual
encroachment of modernity into all areas of everyday life. Outside of the popular sphere, the
concern for consequences of acceleration and speed in the modern world range from a diminished
sense of place to a growing detachment from materiality (Aug 1995; Harvey 1990; Miller 2010). In
this context, it is hardly surprising that archaeology has embraced the ability of technology to
mediate between the physical world of dirt, sherds, walls, and trenches and the portable world of
bits, bytes, and pixels. The willingness to embrace new tools that streamline the process of
knowledge production, starting with data collection and proceeding through analysis and
dissemination, is consistent with the disciplines late 19th century roots in industrial practices and
shaped by its place in the modern university and the information economy.
The following contribution took inspiration from various critiques of speed in contemporary
culture and offers four interrelated observations on recent digital practices in archaeology along four
interrelated lines. First, this contribution will complement my short essay in North Dakota Quarterly
by developing in greater detail the disciplinary context for industrial practices in archaeology. Then,
my article will proceed to consider how the most recent generation of digital tools shape field
practice. This section considers how digital technology influences everything from physical
orientation of the archaeologist at the trench or survey unit to the time spent on various analytical
procedures. Next, I will consider how the interplay of particular digital tools as parts of larger digital
ecosystems shapes the kind of work that archaeologists do. Digital tools are rarely isolated solutions
to archaeological problems, but depend upon more expansive digital infrastructures and practices
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for their value. As a result, there is a tension between the role of digital tools within established
disciplinary workflows and the roles of digital tools within distinctly digital practices within
archaeology. The final section of my contribution is a reflection on the physical place of
archaeological objects and work in a digital world. The use of digital tools has allowed us to produce,
borrowing ideas from Adam Rabinowitz, portable digital surrogates of archaeological objects, and
carry them away from their physical contexts (Rabinowitz 2015). In fact, recent advances in 3D
scanning has allowed us to reconstruct entire archaeological environments on our laptops and
mobile devices (Roosevelt et al. 2015; Quartermaine et al. 2014; Olson et al. 2013; Olson and
Caraher 2015). This paper positions slow archaeology both a call to be more deliberate in the
field, and as a useful way to discuss the larger contexts for both our practice as archaeologists and
the objects that we study.
The modern context of the discipline of archaeology has instilled the discipline with a strong
faith in the continued existence of the past in the contemporary would, waiting to be uncovered, and
the importance of rigorous and consistent practices in revealing the past-in-the-present (Thomas
2004; Schnapp et al. 2004). So at its core archaeology shares with much of modernity a tendency to
compress and collapse both time and place. As Cathy Gere has argued for the sites of Knossos,
through the modern practices of archaeology the past became immediate through a web of
common, if somewhat mythic, origins (Gere 2009).
The development of archaeological practice over the past century has likewise appealed to
modern methods ranging from the adoption of photography and standards of technical drawing, to
the organization of labor along industrial lines. Artifacts of craft persisted in the discipline (Maguire
and Shanks 1996), of course, but these survivals serve as much as a romantic check on the tyranny
of the industrial practice as genuine hold-overs from an earlier era. In fact, archaeologists continue
to negotiate the tension between the significance of anti-modern, embodied knowledge with roots in
craft (Maguire and Shanks 1996; Lucas 2001) and the tremendous influence of the New Archaeology
of the late 1960s and 1970s which prompted the rapid adoption of standardized recording practices
(Trigger 2013, 392-418). The increasing importance of systematic recording complemented the
growth of computer applications in archaeology over the last four decades (Pavel 2010). As
archaeology continues to more and more data driven, the need to collect significant bodies of data
from the field increases. This requirement privileged approaches that drew upon regularity of
industrial practice as opposed to the instinctive experiences of craft.
The adoption of industrial practices has made possible an accelerated archaeological workflow
which accommodated the increasing pace of both academic archaeology and the growing field of
professional archaeology and cultural resource management. Field archaeologists have looked to
develop efficiencies whenever possible in response both to the professional pressures to publish and
to policies in place in host countries that limit the extent and duration of field work. For the growing
field of cultural resource management, the pressures to keep archaeological documentation ahead of
construction projects and to keep projects under bid encouraged new efficiencies in field recording.
The increase in pace of archaeology over the past century may appear inevitable, but, in fact, was the

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result of disciplinary, methodological, and technological transformations in the field that should be
interrogated for archaeology to move forward in a critical way.
The Speed of Disciplinary Knowledge Production
The discipline of archaeology has looked to industrial practices and methods since the 19th
century. Heinrich Schliemann, for example, funded his work at Troy and Mycenae through his
former life as an industrialist and brought industrial organization to his excavations. Moritmer
Wheeler and August Pitt-Rivers followed similar practices by employing relatively unskilled
workmen to excavate while leaving the interpretative responsibilities to there more discerning eye
(Lucas 2001, 8). As Bergrenn and Hodder have noted, the workers were replaceable tools in the
machinery (Bergrenn and Hodder 2003). Even today, in CRM practice, field technicians
represent a subordinate group to the archaeologists who supervise and interpret the results of
excavation for official reports (Lucas 2001, 11-12). The division, then, between data collection and
interpretation and analysis is inscribed in the industrial social organization of archaeological practice.
Academic archaeology saw the full development of the professional discipline alongside the
emergence of industrialized academic disciplines in the modern university (Menand 2010) as well as
emerging museums (Dyson 2006, 133-171), and reinforced the industrial organization of
archaeological and knowledge production. In this context, industrial practice and professional
archaeology are inseparable both chronologically and institutionally. The university developed
systematic ways to educate young adults with courses arranged across disciplines to build key skills,
provide professional credentials, and produce productive contributors to American society (Menand
2010; Novick 1988). While variation existed across universities, over the course of the late 19th and
early 20th century, many oriented their curriculum toward the challenge of providing credentials for
the growing body of professionals required by industry and our increasingly specialized society. This
desire for specialization found its most extreme manifestation in the logic of the assembly line which
assigned individuals to perform single, exceedingly limited tasks over and over. Through
coordinating the hyper-specialized actions of dozens of individuals, the assembly line produced a
single product as efficiently as possible. Higher education employed a similar approach to producing
educated individuals by dividing up the process of education among various specialized experts in
particular disciplines.
Historically, these industrial influences on higher education have incurred resistance, although
much of resistance is not articulated as such. Disciplines like history, art history, literature,
anthropology, and archaeology have periodically used the word craft to describe their
undertakings (e.g. Frisch 1990 or the English translation of M. Blochs classic text: Bloch 1964), but
these were rarely positioned as a countercurrent to industrial models of education and knowledge
production (Shanks and Maguire 1996; Taylor 1998). In fact, the course I taught for years to new
history majors at the University of North Dakota was titled: "The Historians' Craft". Recently,
however, there has emerged a more consistent resistance to the audit culture surrounding
university education has pushed cultural anthropologists to emphasized the holistic, embodied, and
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immersive experience of fieldwork (Herzfeld 2007). Scholars of art and literature historians have
championed the open-ended and contemplative process of close reading or the patient, unhurried
examination of a work of art (Roberts 2013). All these approaches to disciplinary knowledge have a
few things in common. They resists the fragmentation of tasks common to industrial practices and
ground disciplinary knowledge in the willingness to embrace the slow process of experience. As a
result, these disciplines have generally ignored calls for efficiency and embraced practices and
knowledge derived from careful examining, close reading, and contemplation.
Archaeologists have looked beyond contemporary practice to emphasize the roots of their
discipline craft practices. Michael Shanks and Matthew Johnson, for example, have explored the
roots of archaeology in 18th century traditions of historical perambulations, landscape painting, and
literature (Johnson 2007; Shanks 2012). The historical English countryside came alive not through
the systematic treatments by specialist scholars, but through contemplative encounters mediated
through art and literature as much as efforts to describe monuments or historical landscapes. These
pre-industrial approaches to the landscape cast a long shadow across the discipline and served as a
counterweight to the influenced grounded in industrial practices. While the 18th and 19th century
rural wanderers were members of the economic and social elite seeking to inscribe their aristocratic
vision on a landscape as a counterweight to industrialized wealth, craft continued to embody nonaristocratic approaches to knowledge as well. Despite the historical awareness of preprofessional
practices in archaeology (and other discipline), Shanks and Marxist archaeologist Randall Maguire
considered impact of craft to be latent in the field of archaeology and primarily manifest in the
creativity of the archaeologists work where hand, heart, and mind are combined (Shanks and
Maguire 1996).
The spread of stratigraphic excavation in the 20th century played a key roll in rendering the
influence of craft a latent in the discipline (Lucas 2001). Statigraphic excavation continued the
trajectory of the discipline toward industrial practices and modes of organization (McAnany and
Hodder 2009). The identification and removal of discrete levels and the systematic arrangement of
these strata in relation to one another structured the archaeological record in a way that allowed for
chronological and spatial descriptions of past depositional events. The work of dividing the
excavated world into distinct strata paralleled the use of fragmentation as a tool of efficiency in
industrial practice. Working from strata to strata across a trench, stratigraphic excavation defined the
complexity of time and space through distinct slices. Each strata received careful documentation in
notebooks including textual descriptions, illustration, and photography, with the spread of
affordable photographs (Bohrer 2011). Some scholars have recognized in the process of
stratigraphic excavation, a practice that Latour referred to as black boxing which he regarded as a
key step in the production of scientific knowledge (Mickel 2015; Latour 1987). The widespread us of
Harris matrices to reduce stratigraphic levels into uniform boxes further supports this observation
(Harris 1979), and creates uniform divisions or contexts for artifacts later studies by specialists.
These objects often help to assign either relatively or, in best case scenario, absolute dates to each
level, to associate a function with the space, or to describe the event that created it. As archaeology
and excavation has become more complex, it has spawned and relied upon a greater group of
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specialists to assist in identifying and analyzing the material present in each strata. The largest
projects now rely on dozens of object specialists who work in parallel with excavators, wheel-barrow
men, trench supervisors, area supervisors, field directors, ceramicists, bioarchaeologists,
numismatists, to produce archaeological knowledge. Both the assumptions surrounding stratigraphic
excavation and the specialists who support it encourages the maintenance of industrial discipline in
order to a fragmented data set that might be re-integrated at a later point.
The New Archaeology of the second half of the 20th century further contributed to practices
that fragmented archaeological information recovered during field work. The interest in quantitative
analysis and studies that relied upon the precise plotting of sites across a region or artifacts within a
site required the identification and sometimes isolation of discrete objects (Thomas 2004, 76-77;
Lucas 2001: 126-127). New Archaeologists were confident that collecting data from the field
systematically was the central concern for field work, and the understanding of this data through
hypothesis testing and theory building was a secondary process which often occurred in a separate
place (Witmore 2004). Regional, intensive pedestrian survey adopted the techniques of New
Archaeology to construct palimpsests of overlapping maps produced by a range of specialists and,
ultimately, computer produce algorithms (e.g. Alcock and Cherry 2004; Gillings et al. 2000). The
maps produced by rigorous fieldwork and laboratory analysis allowed archaeologists to contextualize
artifact scatters, sites, and settlements on the richly detailed regional scales. Over the past decade,
methodological debates in Mediterranean archaeology and a growing interest in behavioral
archaeology and formation processes have increased the intensity of artifact collection and the
complexity of the resulting maps, but the basic structure of field practices and analysis remain
unchanged (e.g. Bevan and Conolly 2013; Caraher et al. 2015).
If the principles of stratigraphic excavation, New Archaeology and the nature of specialized
disciplinary education provided a methodological, theoretical, and institutional context for
industrialized archaeological practice, archaeologists interest in efficiency also draws from direct
engagement with the fast pace of the late capitalist economy. This is most apparent in the post-war
rise of cultural resource management firms which conduct excavations and survey on contracts
ahead of major construction projects. They constantly negotiate the pressures of construction
deadlines, their own need to document archaeological deposits according to professional standards,
and profitability. The influence, in particular, of the British CRM industry on Mediterranean field
practices cannot be overstated as there was significant overlap in techniques, personnel, and
practices (Pavel 2010, 62-70 and Lucas 2001, 52-63 for heritage practice and CRM techniques; see
also Schiffer 1977 for how data collected from CRM projects intersected with academic research on
a regional scale). This productive cross-pollination has infused Mediterranean archaeology with more
efficient practices at the very moment when the expense of doing field work and increasingly limited
permit restriction has reduced the amount of time archaeological research teams have in the field.
Just as the economic pressures on manufacturing and construction has spurred innovation, these
same pressures have produced a more efficient and streamlined archaeological industry.
The historic pressures on the discipline have exerted a consistent influence on field practices,
and the rise in CRM archaeology has brought archaeology even closer in line with pace of capitalism.
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The remainder of this paper considers some of the specific ways that archaeology has begun to
change as fieldwork has become distributed among specialists and the workflow standardized and
streamlined. In particular, the shift toward industrialized, distributed, field work has changed how we
articulate embodied knowledge in our discipline. Fragmented and digitally mediated practices
contrast in many ways with a craft approach to archaeology mediated by forms of embodied
knowledge that forge a strong connection between the individual, the series of tasks necessary to
produce an object, and the results of this work. Among archaeologists, knowledge in this form
derives from physical contact with the soil, the landscape, and artifacts, and it resists the fragmentary
and systematized organization of contemporary fieldwork and its attendant methodologies.
Embodied knowledge eliminates the divisions between systematic data collection field and
disciplinary knowledge by privileging practices that make time for deliberate interpretation during
the encounter with artifacts, landscapes, and strata in an archaeological context.
Digital Practice in Disciplinary Archaeology
The intersection of archaeology and modernity forms the key framework for the development of
digital practices in archaeology. Just as CRM and disciplinary archaeology adopted organizing
structures from modern industrial practices, archaeologists have largely seen the adoption of digital
tools as a way to improve efficiency (Walrodt, this volume; Olson et al. 2014; Roosevelt et al. 2015;
Helene Wilhelmson and Nicol Dell'Unto 2015). By doing things faster without losing accuracy or
precision, archaeological projects can collect more information, typically encoded as bits of data
which allows them to reconstruct archaeological contexts more completely in less time. Digital tools
have reinforced tactics used by archaeologists to standardize their practices and continued trends in
producing discrete bits of data useful for the kinds of studies developing in New Archaeology. As
Catalin Pavel has argued, these archaeological methodologies manifest themselves in the slow
replacement of trench diaries or notebooks with detailed forms that became widely used in the last
decades of the 20th century (Pavel 2010). While most forms preserve space for interpretation and
analysis at trench side, the dominant trend has been toward more atomized recording designed to
improve accuracy in the field, to normalize description for comparison or seriation across a site, and
to facilitate quantitative analysis.
Todays use of iPads or other tablet computers at trench side or in the field reproduce many
aspects of paper forms while enforcing additional regularity in recording. The use of iPads by Steve
Elliss PARP project crystalized the potential of tablet computers to streamline trench side data
collection (see Ellis and Poehler this volume; Fee this volume, Pettegrew et al. 2013). The best
designed applications, like those used by Elliss and Poehlers teams at Pompeii and similar databases
described by other authors in this volume include a combination dropdown menus and open text
fields to encourage trench supervisors to be both consistent and detailed. Moreover, these databases
make it possible to track changes to entries through time allowing project directors to observe how
trench supervisors adjusted their data throughout the excavation process. The data recorded at
trench side eventually becomes part of the larger project database and is made available both on
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devices throughout the project and to the project directors. In short, the data collection process
becomes more straightforward, consistent, transparent, and efficient.
In addition to neatly delineated recording forms and their digital versions replacing the more free
form notebooks, 3D structure-from-motion photography offers a method to streamline trench
and artifact illustration (Olson and Moss this volume; Olson et al. 2014). By breaking a trench into a
series of individual photographs, we can use software like AgiSoft photoscan to produce an accurate
3D model of the the trench. On a day-to-day basis, it is possible to use these methods to document
individual strata in a trench or at least capture the spatial arrangement of various important contexts
at a much greater speed than traditional trench illustration. At the end of an excavation season, when
time always seems at a premium, my project on Cyprus - the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project
- was able to use structure-from-motion images that reproduce overhead trench photographs
without the inconvenience of erecting a scaffolding or hiring a lift to provide accurate overhead
images of the entire trench. The time saving possibilities and increases in efficiency are notable and
real. At the same time, by working to automate a key component of archaeological documentation,
archaeologists continue to marginalize practices that involve craft modes of production like
illustration or the skilled work of excavator (Perry 2014). Moreover, the emphasis on the efficiency
of these practices runs the risk of undermining the specialized awareness that these practices have
the potential to encourage (Perry 2014; Morgan 2009; 2012).
To achieve these efficiencies, both of standardized recording sheets in paper and digital form
and structure-from-motion photography transform the archaeologist and archaeological information
in similar ways. First, both techniques involve the archaeologist breaking the site into fragments. For
recording sheets, this involves dutifully filling in a series of predetermined descriptive fields ranging
from soil Munsell color to dimensions, elevations, and features. It is hardly surprising that survey
projects which developed directly from the ideas expressed in New Archaeology relied on forms and
digital recording from the start of the famed second wave surveys in Greece (Bintliff, Howard,
Snodgrass 1999; Cherry 2003). Structure-from-motion photographs are likewise fragmented views of
the trench that rely on computer algorithms to reconstruct their proper relationships.
The process of producing these digital, fragmented data sets changes the pace, focus, and
structure of the archaeological work. While attention to detail has always been central to good
archaeological practices, the inefficiencies of traditional archaeological field work often provided
opportunities to consider contexts as whole. Some of these opportunities for slow archaeology
derive from time-consuming processes like preparing trench plans, drawing scarps, or describing
complex stratigraphic or horizontal relationships on blank notebook pages. Other opportunities,
however, require intentionally pulling back from efficiencies to give archaeologists an opportunity to
understand space as a unified whole. For example, in the Western Argolid, we asked team leaders to
stop recording their detailed forms periodically throughout the day and to look across the landscape
to understand the larger context for their work (See Mickel 2015 for the value of these unstructured
notebooks). In excavation, the time to handwrite and to draw not only slows down the work, but
might also improve our ability to remember and recall contexts. The reasons for this are partly
haptic: the act of writing and drawing has been shown to improve recall (e.g. Oppenheimer and
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Mueller 2014). It is also partly to encourage excavators to discern important moments in the field by
marking it with different actions. Finally, moving away from the structure of forms and technical
requirements of proper recording creates a record that corresponds, in some ways, to the
difference between a technical and personal photograph. The former serves to reproduce an object
or situation faithfully, whereas the latter serves to reproduce a memory of an event (Tringham 2010).
Digital Ecosystem
The fragmented, if more comprehensive, records created by digital practices in archaeology
almost always require reassembly after the archaeologist leaves the field. The longstanding focus on
the systematic collection of data in the field has produced a body of information that requires
reassembly according to traditional archaeological practice (Lucas 2001). As the information
collected in the field has become more granular and more digital in character, the tools and
techniques required to reassemble it have become more complex. The archaeologist is both at the
top of a system of excavators, surveyors, and specialists but also interacting with complex hardware
and software applications which range from basic Access and Filemaker databases, to more
complex applications like ArcGIS maps and 3D imagining suites, and intermediary programs that
allow for data to move between applications and devices. This software, as well as the hardware used
to collect data at trench side or in the survey unit, function as parts of a larger digital ecosystem (for
the use of the term ecosystem in the context of digital archaeology see Kansa 2012; Forte et al.
2010) . This ecosystem requires qualified personnel and additional levels of vigilance to maintain the
system in which these bits of data make sense. Compared to the relative simplicity of an excavation
notebook which requires almost no particular technology to read and understand, the modern
excavation or survey dataset is a virtually meaningless mass of encoded data.
Our dependence on technology to reconstruct archaeological contexts becomes even more acute
when dealing with data produced by 3D imaging technologies, for example, which rely on either
bespoke or proprietary software to produce legible results. Even if we accept that the basic data
behind 3D imagines, such as point clouds, are actually quite simple to decode and understand, and
that it is possible to archive the photographs, point clouds, and even polygons from which a 3D
model derives, the process of producing a 3D model and the 3D models itself are often the distinct
product of proprietary software. Moreover, as participants in this workshop realized as much as
anyone, our ability to produce 3D models has existed for quite some time, but they remains difficult
to publish outside a few academic publishers, and remain challenging to preserve in a reproducible
way (Reinhard 2014; Opitz 2015). These limitations do not diminish their potential utility, but reveal
one side-effect of fragmenting our archaeological data in an effort to manipulate it in more efficient
(and also more dynamic) ways. Without attention to the larger digital and social ecosystem in which
they function, however, we run the risk of decontextualizing our archaeological processes.
Just as data collection strategies that privilege a more efficient, but fragmented workflow have
separated the work of excavating or field walking from the work of analysis, so have an increasingly
reliance on digital tools - some of which are proprietary and many require specialized skill to
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manipulate - complicated the social organization of the interpretative process. Archaeologists must
now approach critically the digital tools that we use and recognize our limited access to the structure
of these tools and the technologies and code that makes them work. While archaeologists have
always relied to some extent on tools that they did not entirely control (after all, who knows how a
Marshalltown trowel is really made), digital tools are particular fraught because the interplay between
proprietary software and hardware across a digital ecosystem produces a network of subordinate
assumptions that exist outside the archaeologists direct control, but nevertheless shape the basic
structure of our research.
Digital Space
The final part of this paper picks up on the theme of the digital and social context of
archaeology and hopefully returns it to a more familiar debate at the center of traditional
archaeological practice. So far, this paper has argued that digital methods are part of a larger trend to
seek efficiency and speed by parsing tasks more finely. These practices have gone a long way to
solve the practical problems associated with limits in time, funding, expertise, and workforce and
reflects century-long trends in industry, academia, and even archaeological methodologies. At the
same time, the ways in which we have implemented digital tools in archaeology has complicated our
efforts to reconstruct the archaeological context of our excavations (or survey units) and ultimately
the past. A number of scholars have observed that this quest for efficiency and structure in
archaeological method has shaped how archaeologists think about social relations, space, and time
(Lucas 2001; Lucas 2005; Hodder and McAnney 2009). The ability to create accurate and portable
models of complex archaeological relationships has transformed the space of archaeological
thought, and, as a result, shaped our understanding of archaeological context and space. As Chris
Witmore has shrewdly observed, archaeological work takes place across a wide range of media, and
the ways archaeologist mediate the material world have a direct impact on the character of
archaeological knowledge (Witmore 2009; 2004).
Archaeology as a modern discipline cannot escape what geographer David Harvey has described
as time-space- compression (Harvey 1990) which has led to the annihilation of space by time.
Harvey understands the destruction of space as the result of the increased speed associated with the
movement of capitalism in the late modern world. In a very basic sense, Harvey argues that by
reducing friction in the movement of capital, workforces, and information, the experience and
challenges associated with space begin to decrease. Scholars like Marc Aug (1995), Paul Virilio
(1977[1986]), and Hartmut Rosa (2013) have likewise contributed critical attention to the
relationship between speed, acceleration, and space throughout modern society. The modular and
standardized character of tourism, airports, hotels, and shopping malls replace a sense of the local
with familiarity bred through efficiency of experience. Both the experience of speed and our ability
to move through space quickly and regularly has produced increasingly homogenized encounters
with the world. Marc Aug has famously identified these homogenized encounters as taking place in

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a growing number of non-places which range from industrial parks, to airports, strip malls, and
government buildings (Aug 1995).
For archaeologists, digital practices have contributed to the transformation of the survey unit
and trench into regularized space of data collection, and the storeroom, laboratory, library, or faculty
office become the space of analysis. The decontextualized space of collected data is nowhere better
exemplified than the regular survey grid square frequently used to organize intensive survey
collection. The organization of the trench with its neatly parallel sides belies the more chaotic
arrangement of stratigraphic deposits which receive similar order when translated into neatly
arranged Harris Matrices. The regular arrangement of artifacts in trays or boxes in archaeological
storerooms and the translation of these physical containers into neatly delineated and highly portable
databases or into point clouds. The shape of field work becomes focused on the organization and
control over artifacts, space, and data which allows the archaeology to understand the meaning of
those data at another time, but frequently, in another place.
To do archaeology in our offices, we have become increasingly attached to digital surrogates of
archaeological artifacts which we then use to produce the archaeological contexts that we imagine
destroyed through artifact collection and excavation (Roosevelt et al. 2015). In this context,
archaeological artifacts include both traditional artifacts, like pot sherds, statue fragments, and
architecture, and evidence for archaeological relationships, like stratigraphy, soil descriptions, and
other environmental data recorded over the course of an excavation or survey. With the most recent
advances in easy, cost effective, and efficient 3D scanning, it becomes possible to transport a 3D
model of an object or even a 3D printed version of the artifact itself back to their home institutions
on a laptop computer (Olson et al. 2014). Databases, scans of notebooks, photographs, and other
digital records enable archaeologists to reconstruct archaeological contexts thousands of miles from
the present location of the physical object and even further from its physical origin. As Hamilakis
and Ifantidis have recently argued for photographs, digital surrogates are not dematerialized or
abstracted, but experienced in a different material context (Hamilakis and Ifantidis 2015).
As Roosevelt and his colleagues have recently argued, the portability of digital representations of
archaeological artifacts supports the idea that intensive data collection is the best way to reconstruct
stratigraphic contexts (Roosevelt et al. 2015). At the same time, few archaeologists would deny that a
data set can be completely exhaustive. This is something recognized as much through anecdotal
experience as the drive behind efforts to produce exhaustive datasets through the systematic
collection of photographs, descriptions, and even 3D models. The limits of these datasets and the
constant refrain that archaeology is destruction reminds us of a slightly different discourse: the
importance of archaeological provenience. Looted objects are less valuable to archaeologists because
the act of looting has rendered without a proper archaeological context or in a more general sense,
out of place. Most archaeologists agree that calls for the repatriation of artifacts - whatever the
modern political context for such gestures - is important because it enables us to understand the
connection between objects and their broader context. To bring all remaining fragments of the
Parthenon Marbles together within view of the Athenian Acropolis represents an effort to restore

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the building, its sculptures, and Classical Athens to some kind of recognizable whole. Digital
surrogates, plaster casts, and scale models simply do not suffice.
This being said, I obviously recognize that excavation involves some kind of displacement. We
replace this displacement of soil and objects by establishing an archaeological context. This
archaeological context, however, has traditionally had a physical connection with the location of
excavation or survey. We tend to localize these archaeological contexts by connecting sites to
museums, artifacts to storerooms, and ensuring that appropriate archaeological authorities have final
reports, copies of notebooks, and even subsequent publications. Lectures, site tours, and other kinds
of outreach are becoming more and more common even at as site as visually unremarkable as ours
at Pyla-Koutsopetria. Like widely supported calls for repatriation, something about archaeology
remains unmistakably local.
Conclusion
The growing adoption of digital technology in archaeology has the potential to transform
practice and recontextualizing archaeological space. Slow archaeology is not meant to be a call to
uncritical luddism or an expression of 21st century archaeological anxiety, but a point of departure
for a more substantial critique of our digital future. Moreover, the slow movement has received
significant criticism even in the popular media for celebrating an affluent and distinctly Western
engagement with technology and a nostalgia for craft that can only exist in a world deeply indebted
to its opposite. Local food can only thrive against the security of a global food supply, craft
production exists today only as a limited alternative to mass-produced and mass-market goods, and
celebrations of the regionalism rarely challenge global perspectives on human rights, medicine,
science, or education. In archaeology, my perspective as a tenured, associate professor who has
access to multiple project datasets, institutional resources, and technologies provides a position
within the discipline, field work, and professional life that has the luxury to emphasize critical
engagement with digital tools.
The use of digital tools in archaeology has tracked larger trends that look to fragmenting
processes and data to gain speed and efficiency. This trajectory is consistent with both the modern
character of archaeology as a discipline and responsive to the pressures of both academia and field
work. The growing adoption of complex digital ecosystems, trench-side computers, 3D imaging
technologies, and even more finely grained documentation practices, has produced archaeological
practices that see field work as data collection. The work to understand and assemble the collected
bits is work left to offices and laboratories and relocates the space of archaeological knowledge
production. The continued use of digital tools in the field require critical perspectives on claims that
digital practices will produce more, better, archaeological knowledge.

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Working Draft. August 17, 2015. Do not cite without authors permission.

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