As with the influx of more accurate instruments and optically consistent paper-based media during the Napoleonic Wars, the enlistment of photography or even new technoscientific practices such as radiocarbon, new media technologies have brought about an intensified period of sociotechnical transformation. As such, these new, digital media are beginning to affect radical shifts in archaeological practices (e.g. Hodder 2000). But contemporary modes of documenting landscape, I suggest, are still overwhelmingly oriented around 19th century answers to questions of how to best mobilize landscape in the form of flat, combinable, superimposable paper-based inscriptions. New media, it is demonstrated, facilitate ways of attending to those qualities of the material world sieved away through such paper-based modes of documentation. However, as with the enrollment of photography, the ramifications of the shift to new media are slow to be realized. Yet, to be sure, we no longer need be exclusively beholden to the predominately 19th century scenographies, which continue to be manifest through remediated digital modes. I will qualify these assertions in what follows.

In this chapter I detail the ways in which the qualities of new, digital media differ from the paper-based modes discussed in the previous chapters. I contextualize recent archaeological discussions of new media and then, drawing upon Lev Manovich’s thesis from The Language of New Media, I compare new and paper-based media. It is argued that because new media allow us to manifest other qualities of the material world they provide both the means and the ends through which we can rework and rearticulate materials and contexts detailed in previous archaeological practice. As the chain of references left behind in the AEP archives are made up of more traditional, paper-based, modes of documentation this chapter will focus on the potentials of digital technologies as modes of engagement, reiteration and articulation in archaeological practice. In this way, I detail the digital media—social software, sound footage, peripatetic video and digital templates—I have deployed both in the reiteration of AEP practice on the ground in the Greek countryside, and in the rearticulation of the landscapes documented during the intensive survey between 1979 and 1981. By mobilizing these digital allies in our documentation of the material past, I suggest that we not only facilitate future reiterative research by holding onto multiplicities, but we also facilitate better iterative research in moving toward our own publication ends whether paper-based or digital.

Forward to: Multiple fields methodologies—mediating materiality

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