Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: A Digital Archaeology Workshop

I’m pretty excited to head back to the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts this winter to participate in another exciting workshop focusing on digital archaeology. The last workshop hosted by Eric Poehler at the University of Massachusetts – Amherts was great. This years worshop is hosted by Erin Walcek Averett (Creighton University), Derek Counts (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Jody Gordon (Wentworth Institute of Technology), and Michael K. Toumazou (Davidson College). 

This group all hails from the Athienou Archaeological Project (AAP) on Cyprus. They work about 10 miles inland from my site at Pyla-Koutsopetria and helped us tremendously with advice and support as our project got started. Now, the AAP folks are moving into the digital realm in a deliberate and serious way. This conference is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Creighton University, the Wentworth Institute of Technology, Davidson College, and the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. 

Here’s the program.

The list of contributors is like a who’s who in digital field archaeology in the Mediterranean world these days so the conversation should be lively and productive. I think that these annual meetings which bring together the same core group of digital archaeology practitioners has the advantage of allowing ideas and conversations to develop, but runs the risk of creating an echo chambers. Right now, we’re not an echo chamber, which is good, and this workshop will bring in some new voices to the conversation which will almost certainly leaven the results. 

The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project is represented by Sam Fee and my paper. For my paper, I’m continuing to develop the idea of Slow Archaeology as a complement and counter-weight to current trends in digital archaeology that privilege efficiency and speed in the field. My first publication developing some of these ideas will appear early next year in a special edition of a literary journal (GASP), North Dakota Quarterly. I’ll keep folks in the loop as I develop my paper.

Click through the workshop’s website and, if you’re in the area, register and come and join the fun! We’ll have a twitter hashtag – maybe #MobileArc – to open the conversation up to a global audience.