Category: digital archaeology

A Prehistory of Digital Archaeology

Jeremy Huggett
The EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge
The EDSAC computer at the Mathematical Laboratory, University of Cambridge (1949-1958)

As a species, we are fascinated by origins – as Maya Angelou, the American poet and civil rights activist is attributed as saying, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been”. Of course, much of archaeology is concerned one way or another with narratives around origins, be they people or pots, but digital archaeology seems much less interested in its own origins. As part of a recent presentation on the digitalisation of archaeology to the Norwegian Institute at Athens, I took the opportunity to look back at what I loosely called the ‘prehistory’ of digital archaeology as the basis for looking forward. What was digital archaeology like at its beginnings, at least seventy years or more ago? It turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer: other than some important work by Paola Moscati and Francois Djindjian, for example, digital archaeologists are remarkably bad at thinking about our past.

The relative lack of attention to digital archaeology’s past could be seen to be a natural consequence of the ever faster developing digital environment, but it may also be a reflection of the significance that has been given to George Cowgill’s 1967(a,b) review of computer applications in archaeology. According to Cowgill, the earliest archaeological computer application he knew of was by Jean-Claude Gardin and Peter Ihm in France in 1958-1959 (1967a, 17). He also identified James Deetz as responsible for the earliest use in the USA in 1960. Cowgill’s statement has served as the basis for most subsequent reviews (e.g., Wilcock 1999, 35; Watrall 2016, 346; Huggett 2018) and has consequently become something of an origin myth. Not surprisingly, dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear that this is not the whole story.

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Changing Interfaces

Jeremy Huggett
Image of Canmore and Trove search pages
Search succession – Canmore (left) and Trove (right)

We seem to be living in interesting times here in the UK, at least as far as changes to major archaeological digital infrastructures providing access to national historic environment records and associated archive data are concerned. The Archaeology Data Service has radically updated ArchSearch with a new interface; in Scotland, the well-established Canmore has been replaced by the new Trove website; in England, the launch of a new Heritage Gateway is due by the end of the year. Novelty can be very unsettling and risky, especially when it involves the replacement of a long-established, familiar, and reliable, digital system. And of course, unwanted novelty can give rise to resistance and complaint. So how is that working out?

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In the Shadow of Digital Machine-Gods?

Jeremy Huggett
Original image by NoName_13 via Pixabay

I recently used a citation analysis of the Computer Applications in Archaeology annual conference proceedings as a proxy for examining the spread of digital archaeology across the broader discipline (Huggett 2024). Admittedly to my surprise, the results seemed to show that the debates and methods of digital archaeology had significantly infiltrated the wider archaeological discipline, at least as evidenced in citations of CAA papers in books and journals outside of digital archaeology (although not conference proceedings).

But as if to burst my newly optimistic bubble about the influence of the work of digital archaeologists across the broader discipline, a chapter recently appeared which sought to examine the influence of digital technologies on archaeology (Ribeiro 2025). It does so almost entirely without reference to any work in the field of digital archaeology: Hacıgüzeller et al. (2021) is the only ‘digital’ reference in the piece. It’s perhaps why Ribeiro can boldly claim that “… little has been said about how technology has influenced the practice of archaeology itself.” (Ribeiro 2025, 45) since discussions and debates within digital archaeology on that topic appear to be entirely overlooked. But to put that aside, it does mean that the chapter provides an interesting viewpoint on digital matters from a perspective specifically outwith digital archaeology itself, and so, in a way, shines a different light on digital technology in archaeology. It’s a perspective that those of us working in digital archaeology can respond to even if, in many cases, we may think we have already done so.

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Ethereal Ethics

Jeremy Huggett
Image by Nick Youngson; CC BY-SA 3.0; attributed to Alpha Stock Images; original image from Picpedia.Org

In certain respects, ethics can be regarded like the air that we breathe: they surround us, whether recognised or not, influencing our decisions, relationships, and institutions. In an upcoming book chapter (Huggett, forthcoming a), I perhaps rather boldly argue that there is no such thing as a coherent digital ethics in archaeology. I’m not suggesting that digital archaeologists are acting unethically. It’s more that digital ethics have a somewhat ethereal quality and are rarely made explicit, let alone comprehensively debated, and, where they are discussed (e.g., Colley 2015; Dennis 2020), this is often at a human rather than technological level (see the Computer Applications in Archaeology ethics policy, for instance). The absence of a more expansive digital ethics could lead us to over-estimate our ethical performance and that of our technologies, and make us blind to our – and their – ethical failings.

Ethical principles are a part of both everyday life and archaeological practice. They are assimilated through education, training, and practical experience, but they do not require to be written down to govern what passes as normative behaviour. The absence of a codified ethics therefore cannot be used to infer a lack of ethics although codification can provide guidance and reassurance. However, ethical expectations are not universal and differences between cultures and contexts can result in misunderstanding and offence. Nor is there a uniform strategy to ethics, as is demonstrated by the number of different approaches to ethics. For instance, utilitarian ethics emphasise the consequences of actions, whereas deontological approaches are concerned with duties and rules of behaviour, while virtue ethics emphasise the moral characteristics of individuals and groups rather than their specific actions. The reasoning involved in arriving at an ethical determination therefore can be quite different and may be more or less helpful in different circumstances. Consequently, Beever et al. (2020, pp. 37–39), for example, propose a pluralistic approach which considers the perspective of multiple ethical theories for a more practical, robust, and inclusive approach to decision-making. In archaeology, Carman (2024, p. 176) and González-Ruibal (2018, p. 355), for example, similarly propose pragmatic rather than instrumental approaches to ethics.

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The Data Interface

Jeremy Huggett
Painting of woman looking out of window by Friedrich
Detail from Woman at a Window, by Casper David Friedrich (1822)

We understand knowledge construction to be social and combinatorial: we build on the knowledge of others, we create knowledge from data collected by ourselves and others, and so on. Although we pay a lot of attention to the processes behind the collection, recording, and archiving of our data, and are concerned about ensuring its findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability into the future, we pay much less attention to the technological mediation between ourselves and those same data. How do the search interfaces which we customarily employ in our archaeological data portals influence our use of them, and consequently affect the knowledge we create through them? How do they both enable and constrain us? And what are the implications for future interface designs?

As if to underline the lack of attention to interfaces, it’s often difficult to trace their history and development. It’s not something that infrastructure providers tend to be particularly interested in, and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine doesn’t capture interfaces which use dynamically scripted pages, which writes off the visual history of the first ten years or more of development of the Archaeology Data Service’s ArchSearch interface, for example. The focus is, perhaps inevitably, on maintaining the interfaces we do have and looking forward to developing the next ones, but with relatively little sense of their history. Interfaces are all too often treated as transparent, transient – almost disposable – windows on the data they provide access to.

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Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust

Jeremy Huggett
Trust - broken egg
Adapted from original image by Kumar’s Edit, CC BY 2.0 Deed

It’s been some time since I last blogged, largely because my focus has lain elsewhere in recent months writing long-form pieces for more traditional outlets. The most recent of these considers the question of trust in digital things, a topic spurred by the recent (and ongoing) scandal surrounding the Post Office Horizon computer system here in the UK which saw the false conviction for theft, fraud, and false accounting of hundreds of people. One of the things that came to the fore as a result of the scandal was the way that English law presumes the reliability of a computer system:

In effect, the ‘word’ of a computational system was considered to be of a higher evidential value than the opinion of legal professionals or the testimony of witnesses. This was not merely therefore a problem with digital evidence per se, but also the response to it. (McGuire and Renaud 2023: 453)

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Data Archives as Digital Platforms

Jeremy Huggett
From Cory Doctorow’s article, based on a 1936 original drawing by Wanda Gag for ‘Hansel and Gretel’ by the Brothers Grimm.

Cory Doctorow recently coined the term ‘enshittification’ in relation to digital platforms, which he defines as the way in which a platform starts by maximising benefits for its users and then, once they are locked in, switches attention to building profit for its shareholders at the expense of the users, before (often) entering a death-spiral (Doctorow 2023). He sees this applying to everything from Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Reddit, Steam, and so on as they monetise their platforms and become less user-focused in a form of late-stage capitalism (Doctorow 2022; 2023). As he puts it:

… first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. (Doctorow 2023).

For instance, Harford (2023) points to the way that platforms like Amazon run at a loss for years in order to grow as fast as possible and make their users dependent upon the platform. Subsequent monetisation of a platform can be a delicate affair, as currently evidenced by the travails of Musk’s Twitter and the increasing volumes of people overcoming the inertia of the walled garden and moving to other free alternatives such as Mastodon, Bluesky, and, most recently, Threads. The vast amounts of personal data collected by commercial social media platforms strengthens their hold over their users, a key feature of advanced capitalism (e.g., Srnicek 2017), making it difficult for users to move elsewhere and also raising concerns about privacy and the uses to which such data may be put. Harford (2023) emphasises the undesirability of such monopolisation and the importance of building in interoperability between competing systems to allow users to switch away as a means of combatting enshittification.

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Digital Twins

Jeremy Huggett
Adapted from an original by MikeRun; CC BY-SA 4.0

Sometimes words or phrases are coined that seem very apposite in that they appear to capture the essence of a thing or concept and quickly become a shorthand for the phenomenon. ‘Digital twin’ is one such term, increasingly appearing in both popular and academic use with its meaning seemingly self-evident. The idea of a ‘digital twin’ carries connotations of a replica, a duplicate, a facsimile, the digital equivalent of a material entity, and conveniently summons up the impression of a virtual exact copy of something that exists in the real world.

For example, there was a great deal of publicity surrounding the latest 3D digital scan of the Titanic, created from 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 digital images and 4K video footage, and having a resolution capable of reading the serial number on one of the propellors. The term ‘digital twin’ was bandied around in the news coverage, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it simply means a high-resolution digital model of a physical object although the Ars Technica article hints at the possibility of using it in simulations to better understand the breakup and sinking of the ship. The impression gained is that a digital twin can simply be seen as a digital duplicate of a real-world object, and the casual use of the term would seem to imply little more than that. By this definition, photogrammetric models of excavated archaeological sections and surfaces would presumably qualify as digital twins of the original material encountered during the excavation, for instance.

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Digital Tools or Knowledge Devices?

Jeremy Huggett
A characterization of humanities knowledge based on the @gapingvoid information-knowledge visualization by Deb Verhoeven (CC-BY 4.0)

Digital tools increasingly permeate our world, supporting, enhancing, or replacing many of our day-to-day activities in archaeology as elsewhere. Many of these devices lay claim to being ‘smart’, even intelligent, though more often than not this has more to do with sleight of hand and invisible software functionality than any actual intelligence. As Ian Bogost has recently observed, the key characteristic of these so-called smart devices is not intelligence so much as online connectivity, the realisation of which brings with it external surveillance and data-gathering (Bogost 2022). Such perceptions of ‘smartness’ might also point to a tendency for us to overestimate the capabilities of digital tools while at the same time minimise their influence.

In this light, I came across an interesting quotation from an anonymous archaeologist cited in Smiljana Antonijević’s book Amongst Digital Humanists: An Ethnographic Study of Digital Knowledge Production who said:

In archaeology, digital technologies such as GIS applications, laser scanning, or databases have been used for decades, and they are as common as a trowel or any other archaeological tool. (Antonijević 2016, 49).

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Digital Recall

Jeremy Huggett

Total RecallWe’ve all experienced that rush of recollection when we uncover some long-hidden or long-lost object from our past in the bottom of a drawer or box, triggering memories of encounters, activities, people, and places. We’re accustomed to the idea that we use evocative things as stored memories, deliberately or inadvertently, and as distributed extensions of our embodied memory (e.g. Heersmink 2018). Is it the same with digital objects? For example, van Dijck asks:

Are analog and digital objects interchangeable in the making, storing, and recalling of memories? Do digital objects change our inscription and remembrance of lived experience, and do they affect the memory process in our brains? (2007, xii).

Perhaps it’s a neurosis brought on by the contemplation of my excavation backlog, but I think there is a difference: that not all analog objects are equally interchangeable with digital equivalents in terms of their functioning as distributed memories, and that this difference is significant when we consider the archaeological narratives we are able to construct from our digital records. It may be that this perspective is coloured by the physical nature of my backlog from the 1980s and 1990s which for various reasons sits on the cusp of analog/digital recording. Although Ruth Tringham recalls how in the 1980s the digital recording of hitherto paper records was distrusted (Tringham 2010, 87), not least due to concerns about the fragility of the hardware and impermanence of the product, in my case it was rather more prosaic: as someone working with computers full-time in my day job I had no desire to turn my excavation experience into a busman’s holiday as the on-site computer technician. The downside was that I subsequently gave myself the monumental task of manually entering the record sheets into the database and scanning/digitising the plans and sections in the off-season. In retrospect, however, this provides the opportunity to consider the different affordances of the two sets of analog and digital records, a perception that is reinforced by the pre-pandemic experience of packing my office which incorporated two days of sorting and moving the physical archive and about five minutes transferring the digital files.

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