Archaeology and digital humanities: the road already travelled and the road ahead

Computer Application and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference 2022 (CAA 2022)

Oxford. Reino Unido
Congreso. 2022

It is admitted that archaeology and archaeologists are very often absent from debates, conferences, papers about digital humanities. Most of archaeologists do not know exactly what digital humanities are consisting in and a few of them identify themselves as digital humanists. Their research projects are rarely funded from the agencies and programs concerning digital humanities. Ethan Watrall proposed to see digital humanities as a metaphor of a tent (Watrall 2016). As this author wrote, “most archaeologists (…) are so far away from the tent that they cannot even see it”. This session proposes to give an opportunity for archaeologists to make the point on this lack and to identify ways of reinforce the place of archaeologists in digital humanities debates and practices.

One major issue is to improve capacities of archaeologists to know how to be involved in transdisciplinary projects and not only in multidisciplinary ones. Research activities to be engaged in this domain would have as objective for archaeologists not to become computer specialists but to know where to find digital skills they could need and to be able to collaborate with them. Another objective for archaeologists could be to identify trends and capacities of digital technologies already used in other disciplines that could be adapted in their own.

Archaeology. Digital humanities. Roadmap.