Digital Methods in Archaeology

Digital tools have become as fundamental to archaeology as the trowel, and are today integral to archaeological practice and knowledge production. Many questions still surround the digital turn in archaeology, however. How do we go about the process of collecting, manipulating, and displaying digital data? How do we test our own ideas, and make arguments to others, with digital methods and data? How can we use digital methods to do more than simply produce impressive visualizations? Are there, in fact, intellectual rewards for using digital methods in archaeology, or are the benefits primarily to efficiency? This course focuses on acquiring and using digital data in archaeology. Such a focus suggests three underlying questions:

• What are digital data?
• Where do digital data come from?
• What are digital data used for?

These questions have both practical and theoretical implications, each of which will be explored through hands-on experience and published case studies. In addition, at a more meta-level, this course also examines the question of whether digital data and methods are fundamentally changing the practice and potential of archaeology. To engage with these questions, this course focuses on digital methods of archaeological documentation and exploration, pairing hands-on practice with critical discussion of published case studies.